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katalyna-rose · 4 years ago

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Kat’s Rat Shopping List

I’ve gotten a few requests for a shopping list of my rat setup (tagging @collapseofthesky because they requested this, specifically, but I’ve had a few others message me), so I thought I’d give it a try and also add a few explanations for why I do some things the way I do. As such, this is going to be a very long post and is therefore under a cut. There will be a basic shopping list without all the explanations at the very end of the post under TL;DR if you don’t care about the rest or whatever.

I had a lot of fun with this and spent way more time on it than I meant to, and might be open to doing more of this kind of thing in the future.

Cage

First up, the cage. Obviously. I’ve said it before but it’s a Double Critter Nation and a Single Critter Nation with the side panels removed and zip tied together. These are sometimes sold in pet stores (the locally owned pet store I prefer has them in stock). I bought mine online because of a really good sale, but you can sometimes get really lucky and find them for resale on Facebook Marketplace or Craigslist for super cheap. I love this cage because the whole front opens up and that makes it super accessible and easy to clean, decorate, and get to my pets wherever they may be. It’s also huge!

US minimum for rat cages is 2 cubic feet per rat, with a minimum of two rats because rats cannot be housed alone as they are extremely social animals. No, human companionship is not enough, rats need same-age, same-species companionship at all times. Please be aware, as well, that minimums are not the ideal to strive for. Whatever space you intend to dedicate to your rats, fill it! Fill it all up! And if you don’t have enough space for a large cage, don’t get rats. My setup, with the Home Depot/Lowe’s large cement mixing tubs in the bottom, is roughly 45 cubic feet of space. If we’re looking at minimums, this means I could house 22 rats! There’s no way that 22 rats could ever actually be comfortable in my setup. It would be insane, chaotic, and extremely messy. So why would 2 rats be comfortable in 4 cubic feet? They wouldn’t. More space is always better, hard stop.

Also remember that wire cages with bar spacing of no more than an inch for adult rats and no more than half an inch for small or young rats is a must. Tanks are absolutely not recommended for rats due to poor ventilation, which will cause respiratory issues and allow ammonia to build up much faster.

Bedding

This is different from nesting. Yes, it is. Bedding is the substrate used at the bottom of the cage or on shelves to catch errant droppings and urine, and is generally left where it is by the rats because they have no interest in it.

My main bedding is pine wood horse stall pellets. They are as dust free as the alternatives like shavings or paper pellets, and combine the best aspects of both those types of bedding with the ammonia-neutralizing effects of wood shavings and the compact, easy-to-clean nature of pellets. I love them. I also get them super hilariously cheap from Tractor Supply Co, so despite it being a little bit of a drive for me (about an hour round trip) the fact that it’s half the price of the next cheapest option more than makes up for it. I buy a bunch all at once and currently have a few bags left in my trunk because I didn’t have enough closet space for them. It’s great stuff. It crumbles when wet so it helps me keep track of how much and where they’re urinating, and it’s easy to spot clean those areas in between deep cleans.

When choosing a wood, if that’s the route you want to go, remember to check what is safe to use. Pine is only safe when it’s kiln-dried, since it contains fragrant oils that can cause respiratory issues in rats, mice, and hamsters. Some people will advise you to stay away from it entirely, and that’s fine, but since pine is often the cheapest option it’s not always viable. Aspen is a safe wood, but harder to find in pellet form and slightly more expensive as shavings. I use aspen shavings in my litter trays. Cedar wood is NEVER safe, no matter how it’s treated. I don’t think cedar is ever safe no matter what for any animal it’s marketed to, actually. It’ll cause respiratory distress in rats, mice, and hamsters, and guinea pigs and rabbits should never be on shavings regardless though I’m pretty sure they’ll still experience respiratory distress. The oils naturally in the wood are not safe, do not use cedar. Also make sure your bedding is as dust-free as possible, also for respiratory reasons. If you have a small animal, their respiratory system is extremely delicate, and that’s just a fact of pet ownership that you should have learned before getting a pet when you were researching how to care for it.

Since I have two shelves in my cage and they are both shallow to the point of not even having a lip (Critter Nation’s only flaw is the trays that come with the cage), I line my shelves with fleece over an appropriately sized bath mat. Fleece makes a great shelf liner, but I don’t recommend using it in the entire cage because it gets dirty really fast and most rats will chew it up, so you’ll both be changing it every other day and going through it super fast as it is destroyed. However, it makes great shelf liners, especially when very little of the shelf is actually available to the rats like in my setup, where the shelves are mostly covered in other things. Remember that fleece must always be lined with an absorbent layer underneath because the fleece itself allows liquid to pass right through it. That’s the point: the fleece stays relatively clean and dry while the absorbent layer takes all the gross stuff away. Towels are generally not recommended for this because rats can get their nails stuck in the fabric and rip them out, which is painful and distressing for the rat and also you. Anything super absorbent with a really tight weave will do lovely here, hence the low pile bath mats I use. I get them for one or two dollars at Ikea and wash them every week. I keep several around to rotate through. The fleece I use is also a fleece blanket from Ikea for a couple bucks that I cut into four sections because that rendered it the perfect size to tuck around the shelves. This makes my bedding extremely cheap, and that makes me happy because I can spend that money on enrichment instead.

Nesting

This is the material that the rats like to push around, dig in, and sleep in. It’s important to provide soft but preferably absorbent materials for the rats to nest in because it’s enriching, comfortable, and helps them regulate body temperature. Multiple types of nesting are recommended for enrichment purposes. Rats like texture! I use unscented, unlotioned tissues as a main nesting material for within their hides because they’re cheap, safe, absorbent, and soft. I bought 30 boxes of 100 tissues each for super cheap online, but you can also buy dollar store tissues or whatever you have access to. Just make sure they don’t have scents or lotions, because those are not safe for your rats’ delicate respiratory systems. The empty boxes (plastic removed) can also be given for the rats to chew up and play in, or you can save them up to DIY some fun toys later, which is what I’m doing.

I also have two dig boxes, which will also go under the enrichment section. The bins I got for cheap from Target, but obviously you can get bins wherever you want to get bins. Just measure to make sure they fit in your cage properly. The only dig box I want to talk about in this section is the hay box, because the dirt is not actually a nesting material but rather an enriching one. So, hay. My girls love this stuff so much that they drag it all over the cage to shove it into all their sleeping areas. They build actual rat nests in the box, tunnel through it, stash food in it, shred it for fun, and generally spend as much time as possible with the hay. I use oat hay for the seed heads that provide additional enrichment and snacks because the rats have to get to the seeds in order to eat them. If you are feeding a low-quality diet to your rats, do not use oat hay because they’ll fill up on seeds instead of eating their nutritionally-balanced food and that is not good. My rats love their food so much that the seeds are a sometimes snack that I don’t need to regulate because they do it themselves. Any good quality hay will do for a hay box, however, and timothy hay tends to be the cheapest option. Just make sure it’s not super low quality, because low quality hay tends to be dusty. As mentioned previously several times, rats have delicate respiratory systems and dust is bad for them. I buy my hay from Small Pet Select because I like supporting small business, ethical business, and businesses that provide excellent products. They are, however, primarily a rabbit site. I keep hoping they’ll expand the other sections of their shop. Also, make sure your rats aren’t trying to eat the hay. This is highly unlikely because rats are smart and know what’s edible and what isn’t, and hay is not edible for rats. If for some reason your rats are eating hay, do not give them a hay box.

Other nesting options I’ve used in the past include cut up bits of fleece, cut up old clothes you might have lying around, and generally just bits of fabric. Just remember to change out/wash them regularly. Ammonia will build up, and once again that’s bad for your rats’ respiratory systems.

Hides and Hammocks

Rats are prey animals. Surprise! As such, they need plenty of places to hide and feel safe. Rats love small, dark places to rest in. Much like many introverted humans, myself included! Make sure to include plenty of hides all over the cage. Variety is excellent here for enrichment reasons. My rats absolutely love Space Pods! Lixit makes the ones I use, but there’s also a brand called Sputnik that’s basically the same thing. I’ve never seen them in stores, but they’re all over the internet. For rats, make sure you get the large size. Honestly I wish it was larger than it is, but oh well. The girls love it anyway. I kept getting sent only the bottom halves, which is why I have two half space pods in my cage. I got a refund or replacement on both because it’s not what I paid for, but, like… I received the usable half, so I’m gonna use it. The girls don’t like to sleep in them without the covers, but they’ll hang out in there and clean themselves, and they climb through them to get from one spot to another.

In addition to the space pods, I also have various other hides. Lixit also makes a pill-shaped plastic hide that I keep on the shelf over the dirt box. They used to use it a lot more than they do now, and I’m not entirely sure why. Even so, they still use it! I also have a woven grass tent that they enjoy, and a cork log. Neither of those are really for sleeping, but they do hide in them sometimes and generally like to hang out there.

Hammocks are great, and also available in wide variety all over the internet and in stores. My favorite banana hammock was just retired, but I intend to get another. The girls loved it and so did I! Hammocks come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and can pull double duty as both a place to sleep and a way to break up the cage so there aren’t any dead drops where your rats can fall from a height and hurt themselves. Fill your cage with hammocks! All the hammocks! Support small creators by buying homemade hammocks! Learn to make them yourself! They’re cheap and easy! Hammocks are great.

Enrichment Part 1: Levels

Rats are climbers. Rats need vertical space as well as horizontal space. Rats are sometimes clumsy idiots who fall off of things. As such, all vertical space must be filled with all kinds of fall breakers. As mentioned before, hammocks are great for this. So are ladders, bridges, ropes, and that Ikea tie hanger I have strung across the back of my cage. If your rat falls from anywhere in the cage, make sure there’s something to catch them!

Also make sure there’s something to do on all the levels of the cage, even if that thing to do is just get from one level to the next. Rats are dexterous and adventurous. Ramps are boring because they’re easy. If you have sick or injured rats, absolutely use ramps! Accessibility matters! If your rats are of sound body, however, make them work for it. Lava ledges and bird perches make great alternatives to ramps. Screw them into the cage walls and watch your rats hop around! They love it. Ladders are also fun, especially if they’re not used the way ladders are meant to be used. Suspend them from things, put them at weird angles, just make sure they’re secure. I get a lot of my levels from the bird aisle at the pet store (or virtual pet store). Be aware that sometimes your rats are going to prefer to climb directly on the bars of the cage. That’s normal! The bars are there, so the rats will climb them. That’s all there is to it!

Climbing frames like the wooden wine rack from Ikea that I have in the bottom of my cage are also good to have. My girls love it, and it does double duty as a chew toy.

Enrichment Part 2: Chewing

Contrary to popular belief and old science, rats do not actually require chews to keep their teeth trimmed. Rats trim their own teeth by bruxing, or grinding their teeth together. This does not, however, negate the need for chews. Rats like to chew! What your rat likes to chew best is entirely subjective. Some rats love wood and sticks, some rats will always chew fabric over anything else, some rats will never chew fabric. Every rat is different! Try as much variety as you can and keep stocked up on the things your rats like best. My rats really like woven grass, and I try to keep at least a couple different kinds around for them. I keep a grass mat on a shelf that they like to pull apart, and the woven grass tent will likely have a short lifespan, as well. There’s a woven grass tunnel thing that they’ve put into the dirt box and are slowly but systematically shredding. My girls also like willow sticks, so I’ve got a couple hanging toys of willow that are very slowly being chewed because there’s so much else to chew. The wooden bridges see a fair bit of chewing, and even the lava ledges get chewed on the edges. My girls also love destroying rattan and wicker balls. I bought a bunch of them for cheap and toss a new one in there about every week or so. They love them. I also got a couple things from Small Pet Select like a pine cone, a bit of natural loofah, and a dried okra pod. So far the okra pod has seen the most action and is shredded halfway to infinity. I think they like that it has seeds inside, but the others get chewed sometimes, too. There’s enough variety in my setup that everything lasts a decently long time. Except the rattan balls.

Enrichment Part 3: Digging

As much as rats like to climb, they also like to dig. That’s why it’s highly recommended to have a dig box. Safe substrate is important here. If you’re going with potting soil, make sure it’s just dirt and doesn’t contain any fertilizer. Personally, I found potting soil to be kind of annoying a little expensive. I prefer coconut soil. I use Exo Terra terrarium soil, which is sold in compacted blocks that you have to hydrate. I use two thirds of the recommended water because my rats don’t need humidity. I use three blocks per dig box, and replace the soil every month because the girls will do their business in it sometimes, leave food in it, leave bits of tissue or hay or various shredded chews. Basically, the dirt gets dirty in bad ways and needs to be replaced sometimes. It can also grow things if left too long because of the humidity (which will be a problem regardless of the type of substrate being used). So every deep clean, both dig boxes get emptied, wiped out, and refilled.

The hay box gets an honorable mention here, since it pulls double duty as both nesting and digging. Triple duty, really, since it’s also a forage toy.

Enrichment Part 4: Misc

Yeah, I didn’t know what category to put this under, so here we are. Litter boxes! No, seriously, this counts as enrichment. Training your rats, whether it’s to do tricks or just poop where you want them to, counts as enrichment. Rats are incredibly smart! They’re at least as trainable as the average dog, especially if they come from an ethical breeder who breeds for health and temperament (let me just slide a reminder not to buy live animals from pet stores that source from highly unethical breeding mills in right here; please support ethical breeders and rescues), and will happily take to any training. Remember that positive reinforcement is the only ethical way to train an animal. Treats are great for this, and your pet will love you even more because every living thing loves food. My rats actually didn’t require much training for their litter trays. Make sure that whatever you’re lining the litter trays with is not the same as their normal bedding. If you’re using aspen shavings in the main cage, use pine in the litter trays, or literally any distinct safe bedding. I use shavings in my litter trays and pellets in my main cage. This helps the rats distinguish the litter trays from the rest of the cage and makes it easier to identify where to do their business versus where not to do so. When you first put the litter trays in, just go in at least once a day and toss any poops you see into the tray. If you see your rats using the litter tray, offer a treat while they’re doing so. Rats are extremely clean animals and they like their mess contained as much as you do. It would not be possible for me to only deep clean once a month if I didn’t have litter trays that I clean out about twice a week (or more, if necessary) to get rid of the majority of the mess and smell. I’d be deep cleaning every two weeks at least without them, so the litter trays are a great investment overall. Your rats will never be perfect about using them, because they’re still rats, but they’ll help a great deal.

Also under this section are forage toys! Do not feed your rats from a simple bowl, it’s boring and encourages stashing, which means you’ll never know when they’ve actually run out of food because they’re just going to pick it up and take it somewhere else and have a great big hoard that you’ll find on deep clean day. You can definitely scatter feed, that’s enriching as well because it makes the rats go looking for their food, but forage toys are the ultimate way to feed your rats, I think. I mostly don’t get my forage toys from the small animal aisle. I do have one that’s small animal specific, a little ball that they roll around the get the food out. I also have some marketed for cats, and some marketed for birds. Having multiple kinds is really helpful. I’ve also noticed that while some stashing still occurs, it’s greatly reduced. I refill the toys as they empty and everyone’s happy.

Food/Water

What you feed your rats is extremely important, obviously. Many commercially available pellet foods marketed for rats are actually extremely not good for rats. The same is true cat and dog food. It is a sad fact that the companies that make these foods tend to be far more interested in their bottom line than the health of your pet. As such, do your research! Always do your research! Know what’s in the food and what your animal should be eating, and try to match those two things up as closely as possible. In the UK rat owners typically will avoid pellet foods and prefer homemade mixes for these reasons, but making your own mix is not always feasible and can be tricky if you don’t know what you’re doing. Most US rat owners tend toward pellets because it’s a lot harder to mess up the balance of nutrients when it’s done for you. Also, the UK does not have Oxbow, which is one of the most popular brands of healthy rat food. It’s the brand that I use, and my rats adore it. Mazuri is another popular and healthy option, but my rats prefer Oxbow over anything else. I kind of want to try making my own mix at some point, but I’m not sure I ever will. Like with most of my rat supplies, I buy food in bulk because it’s cheaper. A 20 lb bag of Oxbow Essentials Adult Rat food runs me about 40 bucks. Be careful to buy adult rat food, even for baby rats, because any food that says Young Rat and Mouse is not going to have the appropriate balance of fat and protein even for young rats. Adult food will do just fine for babies, too. If you want to add some extra protein to their diet, try a boiled egg or bits of meat every now and then, but it’s probably not necessary as long as they’re getting enough food and some extra fruits and veggies now and then. If you want to try making a mix, do so much research before you try it, and make sure your ingredients are good quality.

Rats should also receive other foods in addition to their pellet or main food. Rats are omnivores and love fresh veggies, fruits, milk, eggs, and meat! Make sure you research safe foods before giving them to your rats, as not everything is safe. If you adopt your rats from an ethical breeder, they should have resources available to you on what’s safe and healthy. If you rescue, you can still reach out to established ethical breeders for tips and tricks, or find lists online as you do your research. Some veggies are only safe cooked, some parts of certain plants are unsafe while others are safe, and some foods are only safe for males or females but not the other sex (citrus and mango are the ones I remember that fall into that category). Just do your research and try to keep processed foods away from your rats. Sodium is also not good for them. Any raw meat or fish should be frozen and then thawed before being fed to your rats to kill any potential contaminants. Like always, do your research first!

Rats obviously require water, as well. Water bottles tend to be the most widely accepted way to give rats water, because they don’t evaporate and are easy to keep clean. I, however, have a terrible time with bottles, and they always leak or break. Thus, I have opted for water bowls instead. The girls love them more than the bottles I’ve used in the past, and they’re a little more enriching, as well. The only downside is that I have to wash them out daily. But since I spot clean daily anyway, I don’t mind at all.

First Aid Kit

Any responsible pet owner should always keep a first aid kit around, no matter what kind of pet they have. Pet owners who have particularly vulnerable pets should especially be careful to make sure they have a well-stocked first aid kit. This should include single-use sterile syringes without needles, gauze pads, vet wrap, infant/toddler ibuprofen or acetaminophen, medical tape, cat nail trimmers, and probiotic powder like Benebac. But most importantly, it should include the phone number and location of a vet that will see and treat rats. Have a vet picked out that you have confirmed will see and treat your pets BEFORE getting pets. If an emergency arises and you’re suddenly scrambling for a vet last second, not only do you waste precious time getting your pet the help they need but you may find out too late that the nearest rat-friendly vet is too far away. That means your pet will suffer unnecessarily and you are an irresponsible pet owner. Hard stop. If there is no vet within reach that will see rats, do not get rats. Rats will require a vet trip at least once in their lives, since all rats are extremely prone to respiratory illness. Sometimes this happens for no reason at all, because all rats possess a bacteria in their respiratory systems called mycoplasma. There’s no way to get rid of it and nothing you can do about it except make sure your rats live in a clean, well-ventilated environment with safe bedding and materials. Even with all this, sometimes your rats will get sick. That’s normal! Just make sure you can take care of them when it happens. As such, make sure you have a vet fund at all times of at least a couple hundred dollars, in addition to a well-stocked first aid kit and the name and location of an appropriate vet.

It’s also beneficial and enriching to syringe train your rats. What this means is putting a liquid treat like baby food, yogurt, or apple sauce into a syringe and giving it to your rats. This teaches the rats that the syringe is a good thing so that if you ever need to give them medicine from the syringe (rat medicine tends to be oral and dissolved in a liquid solution, so those needle-less syringes will be necessary) they’re more likely to take the medicine with minimum complaints.

Storage

Maybe it goes without saying, but you also need places to put all of the things for your rats. Keep your first aid kit in a box to itself so you always know where it is, and organize your supplies appropriately. I really like Ikea bins for my bedding and food and other dry bulk items, and I keep a lot of my smaller stuff on a shelf at the foot of my bed. Work with the space you have, and plan appropriately.

And thus concludes this extremely long explanation of the bare basics of healthy rat living. Really, this is the bare basics and not even remotely comprehensive of the options available. Be creative when shopping, and definitely look outside of the small animal aisle at your local pet store because it will not contain anywhere near all of what you need.

TL;DR: A Basic Shopping List of My Specific Setup

-Double Critter Nation

-Single Critter Nation

-Zip ties

-2 Large sized cement mixing tubs from Home Depot/Lowe’s

-Pine wood horse stall pellets

-Low pile bath mats, enough to rotate while washing

-Fleece blanket, cut in quarters to fit shelves, enough to rotate while washing

-Bins to hold digging substrate

-Oat hay from Small Pet Select or Oxbow

-Exo Terra coconut fiber terrarium soil

-Lixit Critter Space Pods, large

-Lixit Small Animal Hideout

-Woven grass mat

-Woven grass tent

-Woven grass tube

-Rattan/wicker balls, lots

-Willow stick hanging toys

-Natural loofah

-Sanitized (and therefore safe) pine cone

-Dried okra pod

-Dog ropes

-Wooden bendy bridges

-C-clips, both the kind meant for shower curtains and smaller ones marketed for kids, for hanging things

-Hammocks. All the hammocks. From everywhere hammocks are sold.

-3 (sometimes 4) Ware Scatterless Lock-n-Litter Small Animal Litter Pan, Regular

-Ikea tie hanger

-Ikea wine rack

-Ikea storage bins

-Forage toys

-Oxbow Essentials Adult Rat food

-Ceramic (and therefore tip-proof) water bowls, and/or bowls that can be attached to the cage

-Sterile single-use syringes without needles

-Gauze

-Vet wrap

-Medical tape

-Infant/toddler ibuprofen/acetaminophen

-Cat nail trimmer

-Probiotic powder like Benebac

-The phone number and location of a rat-friendly vet

-A vet fund of at least a couple hundred dollars

A final note before the end: Always remember to do your research before getting pets, do not get pets if you cannot provide a good life for them with MORE THAN the bare minimum requirements for safe and healthy pets, do not buy live animals from pet stores unless it’s part of a rescue program, don’t take the word of just one person as law, don’t be afraid to ask questions respectfully, and always seek new ways to improve your pet care. This has been a PSA from your friendly small animal enthusiast.

#fancy rats #pet rats #my rat setup #rat care #rat care advice #pet care #long post

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self-loving-vampire · 3 years ago

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Ultima VII Part Two: Serpent Isle (1993)

Summary

Serpent Isle is a direct sequel to the Black Gate. The arrival of the Guardian has been prevented and his cult has been outlawed and disbanded, but his most loyal follower has escaped to a place called the Serpent Isle to enact their backup plan.

But the Serpent Isle is not just an island, it is another world that you find yourself in after sailing your ship between the Serpent Pillars (yes, you get isekai’d while already living in another world).

This strange land is populated by people who fled from your lord long ago, and it seems to be suffering from an apocalyptic event that you soon experience for yourself, as a magical storm teleports your companions away and replaces most of the potent items you arrived with with random junk.

So your goals are clear: Recover your items, find the Guardian’s followers, and try to prevent the world’s destruction.

In many ways, Serpent Isle can feel like a more linear and limited game than the Black Gate (for one, you can’t own and freely sail a ship), but there are actually many things that I think it actually does better.

I played it using Exult and the SI Fixes mod.

Freedom

While Serpent Isle is not fully linear, it is definitely not nearly as open as the Black Gate was.

Where the Black Gate lets you travel nearly anywhere in the world almost immediately, even enabling several forms of transportation for this purpose, Serpent Isle initially allows only one section of the island to be explored with the rest opening up as one progresses through the game.

To its credit, the way in which these areas are locked off are sometimes reasonable and do not feel arbitrary. For instance, Moonshade is an island and nearly every ship in the land have been wrecked by the same magical storms that affected your party at the start of the game, so reaching it is not as simple as just buying a boat and going there.

There are other cases, however, where the restrictions do feel nonsensical. Such as the way the Bull Tower pikemen demand obscene amounts of money for the captain’s release but will happily accept a single much less valuable gold bar instead (since acquiring those is tied to a plot point). Then there’s all the stuff with the Hound of Doskar...

On the positive side, you can deal with various parts of the game in whatever order you desire within these limitations. This includes resolving the central quests in each of the land’s three cities in your own preferred order.

However, the game is still lacking in alternate solutions for quests in general. There are some decisions to be made, but they are rather minor in the grand scheme of things.

Character Creation/Customization

This aspect of the games is just as barebones as the Black Gate. You can only select your name, gender, and portrait. Your starting stats are pre-set and there are no further decisions to be made there.

However, Serpent Isle does have a marginal benefit over the Black Gate in that how you spend your training points matters a lot more, since you can’t just automatically max out your stats by completing the expansion.

Even then, there is not much to the character creation here at all.

Story/Setting

I think this is one of the game’s stronger points. The Black Gate may have had a larger world with more total settlements, but Serpent Isle’s three cities of Monitor, Fawn, and Moonshade are each significantly larger than the average Black Gate town and, most importantly, this world feels more dynamic.

Due to the way many of the game’s quests and events work, Serpent Isle manages to feel more alive than its predecessor. I will not spoil the details, but you often feel like something is always happening and like new developments are organically finding you rather than you having to actively search for them.

As has become typical of the Ultima series, the setting this time around is also centered around virtues, but in this case it goes beyond the Eight Virtues you mastered in the last trilogy.

Serpent Isle’s three cities are inhabited by the descendants of people who fled the reign of Lord British and who resent his edict of the eight virtues. The knights of Monitor considered Valor to be the highest virtue, the sailors of Fawn wanted to elevate Beauty as a virtue, and the mages of Moonshade did not feel that their profession should be associated with the virtue of Honesty.

But in addition to all that, much of the game revolves around learning about and mastering the ancient Ophidian virtue system, which functions differently from what you are used to.

The Ophidian virtues are divided into Order (Ethicality, Discipline, Logic) and Chaos (Tolerance, Enthusiasm, Emotion). The forces composing both sides must be in balance to achieve a new set of principles (Harmony arising from Ethicality + Tolerance, Dedication from Discipline + Enthusiasm, and Rationality from Logic + Emotion).

The incoming apocalypse you face in the game is the result of a cosmic imbalance in these forces. The ancient Ophidians polarized into Order and Chaos factions that warred each other, with Order winning the war and destroying the Chaos Serpent, which causes the universe to begin unravelling.

While this game does have an antagonist, resolving this imbalance remains the most significant part of the game in terms of story.

The game also has multiple big scripted scenes that did not quite exist in the Black Gate, and the world as a whole changes dramatically partway through as a result of a certain event.

Immersion

As previously mentioned, things like the quest design and more dynamic world can help make this game more immersive than Black Gate in some ways. I am reasonably certain that some of the NPC schedules are a bit more complex this time around as well.

There are also a few new things, such as a frozen wasteland up north that you need warm clothes to traverse without freezing.

Apart from that, all the features mentioned in the Black Gate are still present here, such as weather, day/night cycles, and more.

But really I think one of the most significant differences is actually just the fact that you are significantly less overpowered than in the Black Gate and have less allies. I feel like that changes the feel of the game a lot on its own in ways that have to be experienced to be fully understood.

Gameplay

Combat is, as in Black Gate, automatic and uninteresting, though it is slightly more difficult now overall.

The rest of the gameplay is largely the same as in the Black Gate as well, though dialogue has been slightly expanded with more complex trees.

Really the main difference comes down to the differences in the world and available items rather than any mechanical changes.

Some of the most significant items are a ring (obtained from the Silver Seed expansion) that provides infinite magical reagents and a magical goblet that provides endless nourishment. These things are not nearly as broken as what the Forge of Virtue provides in the Black Gate, but are still nice conveniences.

While this game has less towns than its predecessor, it does have larger and more interesting dungeons overall. The one issue with them is that some of the puzzles in them are not very interesting (often amounting to just placing items on pedestals and such).

This is also where I should talk about one of the game’s major flaws: It is the first one where the influence of Electronic Arts began to manifest. It is nothing too major at this point (just wait until we get to Ultima 8 and especially Ultima 9) but it does mean there are some questlines that were left unfinished due to EA rushing things.

It’s not just questlines either. The towns were supposed to be larger and with more content, the player was meant to eventually gain a ship they could freely sail like in the Black Gate, and a major plot element had to be changed. The Silver Seed expansion in particular feels incomplete and inconsequential in terms of story, and is largely centered around four dungeons to explore for unique loot (both the dungeons and the loot are reasonably good at least).

I also dislike just how many plot-critical items are in the game. I would like to use my backpack space for other things.

The game also offers a decent amount of locations to explore, including many optional curiosities unrelated to the main quest.

Aesthetics

While the engine and graphics are largely the same as in the Black Gate, there have been graphical upgrades, most notably in the form of significantly more detailed and lifelike portraits for NPCs.

But I would say that the biggest aesthetic changes here have more to do with the game’s design and atmosphere.

Serpent Isle is a far more unfriendly place than Britannia, and you will be accosted by assassins and deceivers during your quest. It makes for a more grim adventure.

The whole game has a much darker tone than any in the series since Ultima 5, I think. The world is completely falling apart due to the imbalance, with storms obliterating Fawn’s fleet, goblins making significant gains in their war against Monitor, and plagues are starting to break out. You do get the sense as you explore the world that this is a land experiencing its final days.

And things only get worse from here too.

I also like how unique several of the locations are. The city of Monitor is not just a walled city, it is populated by knights who organize into three different commands that rule the city. Meanwhile the city of Fawn is completely unlike any other in the series, being built entirely over the sea.

It is good stuff, and I wish they had had the time to expand and develop these locations as they had originally planned.

Accessibility

Exactly as good in this regard as the Black Gate, I think. Even the increased difficulty (which is still not enough to make this a “hard” game by any means) does not really matter since at the start of the game you get a magical hourglass that can be used to resurrect any fallen party members and the local monks will take care of your own mortality as well.

If there’s frustrations to be had here, they may come more from some of the less intuitive puzzles than anything and plot points than anything. The core gameplay is still extremely simple.

While the game can theoretically be played on its own, I strongly recommend playing at least the Black Gate first to learn a little about the events that led to this whole expedition. The two games really are part of the same package.

Conclusion

Between the Black Gate and Serpent Isle, I always got the impression that the Black Gate was the more popular of the two. I can understand why, as Serpent Isle was a bit rushed and lacks the open exploration that has defined the previous games in the series.

Despite this, I remember loving it about as much as the Black Gate largely because of the atmosphere and how the game feels. It is a particularly easy recommendation for those who enjoyed the previous game, as the engine and mechanics remain largely the same.

I also recommend this game for anyone who may be interested in following the story or looking for an immersive experience, but who doesn’t want to bother too much with stuff like combat or numbers. Even just watching the NPCs go about their day can be fun in this game.

#vampire reviews rpgs #ultima 7 #serpent isle #long post

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newmusickarl · 3 years ago

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Album & EP Recommendations

Album of the Week: Grapefruit Season by James Vincent McMorrow

“I’m trying to be less prepared” stated Irish singer-songwriter James Vincent McMorrow this past week at his Rough Trade Nottingham In-Store show. This was mentioned in the context of McMorrow telling the audience of his decision to “wing it” for his first gig back post-COVID lockdown, rather than intensely rehearsing as he would previously. It turns out this new laidback outlook on life has been key to McMorrow coping better with the anxiety he has dealt with his whole life, but also to unlocking the songs that are to be found on his fifth album, Grapefruit Season.

During the Nottingham show to which I was lucky enough to attend, McMorrow made a point to say that this new album, his first in four years, is the one for which he is most proud, as he felt it was him being as open, honest and care-free as possible with his audience of listeners. This is evident almost immediately on second track Gone, which feels like the tone-setter for the rest of the album, centred on a striking refrain of “I give less f*cks than I used to, still give a lot of f*cks.” Discussing the track with Broadway World last year, McMorrow said:

“Gone is about the disintegration of relationships. In my case, the disintegration of my relationship with myself. No song or lyric I’ve ever written has come as close to this one at capturing how I feel about life - how I hear it, my fear of it, my obsession with it, my belligerent belief that I can control it, my quiet acknowledgment in the middle of the night that I will never control a single thing. And there’s nothing wrong with any of it. There’s absolute beauty in embracing the chaos and the decay.”

This freedom and “embracing the chaos” attitude have clearly helped McMorrow to hit a new creative peak, with many of the tracks on this new collection some of the very best he’s written to date. From the soulful guitar grooves of Planes In The Sky, the string-tinged piano ballad Poison To You and the infectious downbeat pop melody of Hollywood & Vine, McMorrow is constantly found in fine form. However, arguably the album’s finest moment comes in the form of Headlights, a gloriously produced, synth-driven track, which also features some wonderful gospel-like vocals and bluesy guitars towards the back end of the track. It’s quite dazzling, much like almost every track here.

James Vincent McMorrow has always been an immensely talented songwriter, but thanks to his moment of personal enlightenment he is sounding better than ever on this latest album. With unfiltered, sincere lyrics and inventive sonic explorations, Grapefruit Season makes for quite the audio journey.

Listen here

Montero by Lil Nas X

Rapper-singer Lil Nas X seems to cause controversy through simply being unapologetically himself and as a result, his debut album Montero has been one of the most hotly anticipated pop albums of 2021.

Having burst onto the scene with his breakout single Old Town Road, Lil Nas X has since delivered several massive singles in the build-up to this debut, with each one accompanied by a cinematic or visually extravagant music video. The reaction to these by some narrow-minded folk has been that of shock and outrage, with people seemingly appalled and astounded by Nas X’s openness with his own sexuality. Off the back of the bold, tongue-in-cheek video for the title track, some even suggested the singer was actively promoting Satanism through his work. This is all of course nonsense and if they were to listen to his debut album with an open mind, they would find that Lil Nas X is just a pop star that is willing to be refreshingly honest and candid about who he is and what he wants from life.

Both introspective and confessional, Nas X proves across every track on this record that he’s not only capable of writing great pop music, but he’s also not in the least bit afraid of showing his vulnerability to the listener either. This can be seen on recent single Sun Goes Down, where Nas X offers insight to his struggles growing up and fitting in, conflicted by his complexion, his homosexuality, and finding himself lonely and isolated as a result. There are several quite tender moments like this, including the brilliant guitar-driven rock ballad Life After Salem, however they are evenly balanced out with more upbeat moments like horn-backed single Industry Baby. There’s also some pitch-perfect collaborations to be found here with Doja Cat, Megan Thee Stallion, Miley Cyrus and, most notably, Elton John, all lending their talents at appropriate moments.

However arguably the strongest moment comes when Nas X dips his toe into some pop punk for the album’s sort-of centrepiece, Lost In The Citadel. With some stylish production, heartfelt lyrics and a killer mix of guitars and synths, it’s just a mightily well-crafted pop song.

Overall, this is a star-making first outing for Nas X, who was already well on his way to global success before this record had even landed. However now he is well on his way and importantly with this debut, he has shown he is not just a flash in the pan but a truly great popstar in the making.

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Silence by Alexis Taylor

And finally this week, Hot Chip frontman Alexis Taylor released his quite stunning fourth solo album, Silence, a record that comes from the other end of the spectrum to that of his electronic outfit. Built entirely around Alexis’ soulful vocals, a piano and some well-placed, understated string arrangements, there is no dance to be found here but rather a beautiful collection of ambient ballads.

The pick of these is the title track itself as well as Violence, the latter of which offers one of the most haunting tracks I’ve heard all year. Ending quite unceremoniously with the gentle crashing of the Wollongong Waves, if you need something peaceful and reflective this week then I can’t recommend this album enough.

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Tracks of the Week

Let’s Get The Party Started by Tom Morello & Bring Me The Horizon

Kicking off the singles front this week is a rock collaboration of gargantuan proportions as Tom Morello of Rage Against The Machine teams up with Sheffield metal behemoths, Bring Me The Horizon. Built on goliath-sized riffs and an anthemic chorus, this one is a straight up rock banger that will have you moshing out in no time.

Listen here

U&ME by Alt-J

Elsewhere, Leeds-based trio Alt-J marked their return this week with the first single from their upcoming fourth album, The Dream, which is due to drop early next year. My initial thoughts are that this track feels a lot like more of the same, with Joe Newman’s quirky vocals backdropped by some folky harmonies and guitar melodies. It is not a dramatic comeback or shift in style, but fans of their sound will no doubt still enjoy this one.

Listen here

Hall of Mirrors by Let’s Eat Grandma

Also making their comeback this week are the brilliant duo of Rosa Walton and Jenny Hollingworth, otherwise known as Let’s Eat Grandma. Hall of Mirrors is their first new music since their phenomenal 2018 sophomore album I’m All Ears, and sees the duo shift away from their experimental electronica over to the dreamy synth-pop melodies that they first started introducing on that wonderful second album.

Listen here

Godsend by Sundara Karma

Also returning with new music this week are Reading-based indie outfit Sundara Karma, who continue with the pop experimentation they started on last year’s Kill Me EP. With a heartbreaking chorus and some soaring instrumentation, it’s a comeback that’s both immensely moving but also quite triumphant.

Listen here

Earthlings by Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds

Nick Cave & Warren Ellis have also announced a new B-Sides & Rarities album this week. Due for release in October, it pulls together all their best lost gems from 2006 to 2020, including this stunning off-cut from Ghosteen that features gentle tribal chanting over some truly transcendent synths.

Listen here

FAKE by Lola Young

Singer-songwriter Lola Young continues to be one of my favourite discoveries of the year so far, with this new single seeing her channel the late-great Amy Winehouse for this soulful and bluesy ballad. If you’ve not heard Lola sing yet, just check this one out and I guarantee you’ll be blown away.

Listen here

I’m Sorry by Josef Salvat

Australian singer-songwriter Josef Salvat also released his brilliant new single I’m Sorry this week, a pulsating synth-driven track with a wonderful neon-glow and 80s-style pop shimmer.

Listen here

Set You Free by Kyla La Grange

And finally this week, Kyla La Grange made her long-awaited return to the music world, releasing this absolutely amazing and completely unique cover of the N-Trance classic, Set You Free. Also comes accompanied with a typically artistic and colourful video from La Grange, which you should find the time to check out.

Listen here

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restlessmaknae · 4 years ago

Text

measure of life

“I wish I could have your will-power,” she mentioned almost in awe, and in that moment, Luda understood that they would never get it. Never.

♦ Characters: uni student!Jin x uni student!OC (Luda)

♦ Genre: psychological, drama, angst, slice of life

♦ Words: 14k

♦ Warning: this story will be about the OC’s eating disorder - specifically anorexia - evolving and her fight with it, so even though there are no numbers mentioned here, eating disorder habits (calorie counting, weighing oneself, hiding in baggy clothes, lying etc) will be mentioned, so please, if you are easily triggered by the topic, do not read the story!

♦ A/N: Although there are fictional parts, a lot of scenes are inspired by my own life since I’ve also been dealing with anorexia myself, but I’ve been in recovery for three years and I’m better than ever! Therefore, I felt like I could do justice to my journey only if I finished writing this story that I started when I was diagnosed. If you or anyone suffer from an eating disorder, please, reach out for help! It will get better, I promise! My ask box is also always open! 💖

When you look in the mirror, who do you see? What do you see? Fat? What about your waistline? Is it correct? Do you think it should look like this? Do you think you should look like this?

They always say that you are not enough. You are not skinny enough. To be precise, you are not skinny. Who has ever told you that you are? No one? That’s right. That’s because nobody would like to lie to you. They would rather let it slide because they don’t want to hurt you.

Are you okay with that? Are you okay with how do you look? No? Then, change! After all, Jaejun even left you because you weren’t skinny. Or at least, not as skinny as your best friend. Or ex-best friend.

Comparing, hah? What a nasty word! Still, it hurts, doesn’t it? You always knew that she was skinnier than you, she was always more beautiful than you and she was even praised for her pretty features. People even begged her to eat more when you just sat there staring blankly at your empty plate and wondered why nobody had asked you to do the same. Apparently, you never needed those extra calories because everyone knew that you would get fat. They were the ones who couldn’t. There were always people like your best friend who couldn’t gain a single pound even if they ate three times more than you. Not to mention that they could casually eat fatty, unhealthy food while you did your best to avoid it as much as possible. The result couldn’t be seen on you though.

Still, you are the one who’s not enough and you are the one who never once heard in her life that she’s skinny. You try to shrug it off and claim that it’s okay. You are okay with that. But it sucks, right? It does. Every single damn time when she’s munching away on her triple chocolate muffins while you are eating a single apple. Every single time a boy turns around to look at her, totally ignoring your presence. Every single time your friends whine that ’Please, Eunbi, eat more. You are so skinny!’ or ’Please, eat a lot. It won’t hurt, you need it.’

It’s like an invisible bullet through your heart. Every single time they fire at you and you can’t help but get weaker and weaker. You grow to hate yourself, your body, your weight. Everything that is you. Because that seems to be your only flaw now; you are a good student, people think that you have the perfect family, and you have never failed anything in your life. You are only flawed when it comes to your appearance.

Now, put an end to this! Change! It shouldn’t be that hard, right? Everyone’s dieting now, you can do it, too. You are strong enough, you can endure it. In the end, you will surely get what you want. Melt that fat and be the one who people call skinny! Dare to wear girly and not baggy clothes. Months from now on, you shouldn’t be afraid to show your figure to the world. You can do it, you can achieve it!

“Yes! I can do it,” she said to the figure in the mirror, frowning constantly at the sight. All she could see was fat, fat and fat. Her thighs were big, her waistline was something that she wouldn’t dare to look at and her cheeks were puffy. She looked at her reflection again, hoping that the picture would change, the flaws would fade away.

Unfortunately, they didn’t. Unbeknownst to her, it was all in her head, the seed of the growing disease was inside of her. It started with her vision. What she saw was not real, yet she believed that it was real.

“I have to do it,” she claimed confidently, throwing one last flinch at that so-called fat body of hers and left the room.

It was the day when it all started. When Choi Luda decided to listen to the intriguing voice in her head and follow its lead. It was a first-class ticket to the Hell of self-hatred.

You are not enough. I need someone better. You know… someone funnier, more easy-going, someone who doesn’t have such a low self-esteem. I know that you don’t do it to irritate others but honestly… after a while, it can get pretty annoying.

Jaejun’s words were still running through her head when she was on the way back to her apartment, resting her head on the cold glass of the window. It was only an hour ago when the boy confessed that he wanted to break up with her and left her at the restaurant where they had previously decided to meet up. She foresaw that something was fishy when they didn’t even order anything and the words had already slipped out of Jaejun’s mouth:

“We need to talk, Luda,” he announced after clearing his throat to get her attention and that’s how all it started. She didn’t know how long he talked but she knew that he completely broke her heart. Not once, not twice, multiple times.

It started with the fact that he found it annoying that she always refused to go to a fast-food restaurant when he asked her out. It wasn’t because she hated fast food – at that time, she could still stand the thought of eating a burger and chips – but she was fond of old school dates with watching movies at each other’s flats, going to the amusement park, having a picnic outside, going hiking together or merely having lunch at a decent restaurant, not Burger King. Was it really too much to ask? All Jaejun had always wanted to do was to go to a fast food restaurant where they couldn’t even hear each other properly.

On top of that, he blamed her because she wasn’t as lovely as Ara - her best friend. Obviously, she had seen that those two had a thing but she wouldn’t like to admit it. She would have felt more pitiful, she would have felt like she was being used. Jaejun needed her to get closer to Ara. Now, she saw it like how it was, not how she wanted it to be. And it hurt. It hurt as if a poisoned arrow had been sent to her heart, slowly and mercilessly encouraging the disease to spread through her veins and destroy her body.

And then again, she wasn’t enough. She dread those words because it would mean that she failed. All she did was to please others, to meet others’ expectations. She began to lose herself in the midst of trying to be perfect but she didn’t care until others approved of her – her friends, her family, her boyfriend, the professors and the society. She became a perfectionist, someone who feared making mistakes and was terrified to let people down.

You are not enough.

Another teardrop was making its way down her cheeks as she was sobbing silently in the back of the bus. It was past 9pm and she was the only passenger. Not like she would stop wiping if someone showed up but she felt like she was safe. The silence and the monotonous swing of the vehicle was somewhat soothing for her frazzled nerves. Yet, the tears seemed to have no end. She cried, cried and cried some more until a young man suddenly handed her a tissue.

“Is there something wrong?”

The gentle male voice asked and startled Luda who was absent-mindedly looking out of the window. She hadn’t even taken notice of the new passenger as she hadn’t had for that. She tried to pick herself up but to no avail. She was too broken for the time being.

No was what she tried to say but she couldn’t bring herself to lie. She was already fed up with lies, she didn’t want to become a lying machine herself.

“My...” She stuttered in between sobs and didn’t even manage to end her sentence. It was too sorrowful to say it out loud. She felt like if she told someone about the break-up, it would eventually become real and she would need to accept the fact and never broach up the topic again. However, she wasn’t over it, she still couldn’t let go of Jaejun’s words. They were haunting her, whispering creepily into her ears, grabbing her by the wrist and dragging her to the dark hole of self-hatred.

“I-I was actually...” She made an attempt to confess to the stranger but failed miserably. Instead, she burst into tears again.

The teardrops were searing, leaving sorrowful scars on her pale skin, placing poisonous kisses on her rosy cheeks. She wanted to wash away all the memories they had shared with Jaejun but she also felt pitiful at the same time. Was it really worth it to cry over such a guy like Lim Jaejun? Was he really worth it? Were those 11 months that they had spent together worthy of her pearl-like tears? She didn’t know, therefore she felt even more awful.

It got better only when the male started patting her back and gently prompted her to lean onto his shoulder. In the beginning, she protested a bit, fidgeting in her seat to make a decision but after a couple more sad teardrops, she decided to give in. At first, the whole situation felt peculiar – she was crying her eyes out in the arms of another man after an hour of her break-up – but after a while, she found the presence of the guy prominently reassuring and his touch undoubtedly fond.

So she just let it all out. She let the pain take over her and her pride to bury itself with her worried thoughts concerning the cosiness of their scene. The more she stayed in his arms, the less she felt the need to cry. It felt like a safe haven to her. He felt like a safe haven to her.

Her wounds seemed to heal a bit, her mind was less tangled than before as her thoughts weren’t screaming as loudly as they had done so before the young man showed up. She felt at ease for the first time in the last couple of hours and it was all thanks to his assistance. If it weren’t for him, she would have cried the whole way back to her flat.

Speaking of the bus journey itself, they were slowly approaching her final destination and the thought made her come back to her senses. As it crossed her mind, she immediately pulled back from him, a bit ashamed because of the fact that she had just revealed her weak self to a total stranger.

“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry,” she apologised in an instant and busied herself with wiping off the imaginable dust from her jeans. “I’ve just made your shirt all wet. I’m really sorry. I shouldn’t have−”

“No, no, it’s totally okay,” the handsome stranger cut her off and boosted a friendly smile to set her at ease. “When one needs someone to lean on, I am more than happy to be that someone. It would get worse if you didn’t let it out, so don’t be ashamed,” he stated gently, his soft, honey-like voice sending pleasant chills running down her spine.

She couldn’t help but feel guilty at the immediate reaction of her body. He was a stranger after all. His presence shouldn’t have done odd things to the state of her heart the day her boyfriend just dumped her! It wasn’t right.

“But it’s so weird. I don’t even know you.”

“Everyone starts out as strangers, right?” He shrugged it off with the most reassuring smile that she had ever seen in her life. Her shoulders slumped. Unwarily, a smile casted on her face as well.

“Right.” Luda nodded coyly.

The next few seconds were spent in awkward silence, both of them stealing glances when the other wasn’t aware of being watched. Neither of them knew what to say or do until the handsome stranger finally broke the silence.

“By the way, I’m Kim Seokjin. But you can just call me Jin,” he introduced himself as he reached his hand out and she took it without hesitation. She had to admit that his grip was firm yet gentle. His touch was searing yet tempting. She found herself staring at their hands, examining the obvious difference between their sizes. The boy’s hand was so much larger than hers and his fingers were also longer. They looked like the fingers of an artist or at least someone who had constantly worked on something using his hands. She pondered for a thought what he could possibly be doing.

“Choi Luda,” she did the same, bobbing her head and removing her hand from his. “And thank you for−”

“Being your crying pillow?” Jin raised his eyebrow in question, his eyes hinting at his amusement. “Anytime,” he offered voluntarily, making both of them astonished at his remark.

Yet, she soon found herself laughing at his cute comment. It was the first time she laughed that day and it felt like the weight was finally lifted off of her chest. She was finally able to breathe. Her head wasn’t full of negative thoughts. That one monologue wasn’t playing in her head like a broken tape record. No. It was her, the sound of her pleased laughter and his breathtaking smile.

“Now you are laughing at me. Why? I was totally serious!” He acted like he was hurt but she could detect the playfulness in his voice. A moment later, her theory proved right as he also let himself laugh with her. “Just kidding, I’m happy that you can smile now,” he noted smoothly, making her blush like a teenage girl. It was weird to hear something like this from a stranger but it made her heart leap a bit.

Unfortunately, the bus came to a halt and it was already her stop, so she needed to get off. The doors flew open and she didn’t have time to say a proper goodbye even though she wanted to say so many things to Jin. She was utterly thankful for him being there for her despite the fact that she didn’t even tell him that she was under the weather because her boyfriend had broken up with her. Nonetheless, he – quite literally – offered a shoulder to lean on, helping her until she was able to smile again. There was so much to be thankful for, yet the time was ticking.

“Uh, that’s my stop, I need to get off.” Luda jumped from her seat in an instant and swiftly made her way to the door. “Thank you so much, Jin! I hope we’ll see each other in the future!” She hollered before the doors closed behind her.

She pouted a bit as she turned around and the vehicle was already moving but it was immediately replaced by a smile when she caught sight of the handsome stranger who was grinning widely and waving in her direction. Before the bus totally disappeared from her sight, she swore that she had seen a flying kiss from him.

What a day!

There was one thing she hated even more than the fact that she needed to attend her lectures at the university. It was the fact that most likely, she would bump into her best friend. Or ex-best friend. Who knew actually?

Jaejun had dumped her on Friday and here she was in her tiny room the following Monday with tangled thoughts and still no calls from Ara. Did she really think that it should be the way she tells her that Jaejun was interested in her and they actually broke up because of her? She doubted that Ara had no idea what was going on. Even if she really didn’t know, she should have called her to ask her about it, offer that she would listen to her rumblings or suggest watching a romantic movie and cursing all males who were living on this planet.

That’s what they used to do when they had still been best friends. They had been close ever since Luda’s family had moved next door when they had both been little kids. As Ara had been the only girl who had been her age in the neighbourhood, they had had no chance but to play together and the afternoons spent together at the playground had eventually grown into friendship. Ever since the day Ara had been forced to bring cookie to welcome the new neighbours and Luda had been the one to open the door for her, they had been inseparable. High school hadn’t been an obstacle either, they had been just as close – if not closer – as they used to be during their teenage years.

Then, university had come. Two years ago, they had both been accepted at the Seoul National University, therefore they had had to move to the capital. As they couldn’t find a flat which would be able to accommodate both of them, they had to be separated for the first time in their lives. They couldn’t even speak as much as they wanted to since Ara had started studying Korean History while Luda had started studying English Literature. Their time schedules had been different but she wouldn’t say that they had drifted apart. Their relationship had risen to a higher level, a more mature one. It had been a healthy change, an essential one. It hadn’t been until she had started dating Jaejun that things had also started to change between the two girls.

She shook her head fervently at the thought. She didn’t want to think about it. Her mind was already twisted, it was like a living monster. There was that tiny voice in her head that tried its best to persuade her that she wasn’t enough and that’s why people left her. That voice was born when the words had slipped through Jaejun’s mouth.

After that, there was no turning back, it was a constant companion. Although only a weekend passed, it came back again and again. It didn’t win over her, not yet. But whenever she saw a kissing couple on the streets, a flower that she used to get from Jaejun or his favourite fast food place where he hang out most of the time, she couldn’t help but feel worthless.

She couldn’t even bring herself to eat, the thought was sometimes so loud that she even lost her appetite. Other times, she would eat a delicious strawberry cupcake, just to forget about him. At that time, she was still in control of herself, her food and her life. The voice was born but it was still a baby.

“I hate Monday mornings,” she murmured under her breath as she made her way to the bathroom.

“You are not alone with that,” a raspy voice hollered from the opposite room. It was Luda’s flatmate – Inna – who was an early bird, even when she didn’t need to get up early for her classes. She was one year older than her and the flat that she rented was actually Inna’s father’s. They got on pretty well, although they didn’t talk a lot.

“Good to hear that,” she commented and a chuckle made its way past her lips as she stepped into the bathroom.

It took her 20 minutes to get changed and be ready to face the inevitable. She grabbed some baked goods – her favourite handmade, buttery croissants - and a cup of hot chocolate on her way to the university, making sure that she would get enough energy until lunch. She had decided to cut back on her snack time previously between breakfasts and lunch because she didn’t have the time to eat them due to her busy schedule. Plus, she convinced herself that it was only a habit that she started when she was still a secondary school student, so she wouldn’t need those extra calories anymore. But breakfast was breakfast and she adored croissants, she couldn’t imagine her mornings without some pastry accompanied by a hot drink.

Of course, as time went by, it all changed.

“Luda, can we talk?”

The voice that she didn’t want to hear actually called her name. At first, she assumed that it was all in her head but when she turned around to look for its owner, she almost literally bumped into Ara.

“I’m sorry, I’m a bit busy now,” she made an attempt to excuse herself because the thought of having a chat with Ara made her stomach churn with worry. “Can’t we talk a bit later?” she motioned with a forced smile plastered on her face but actually, she didn’t want to talk to her. Not then, not later, not ever. If she really wanted to talk to her, she should have called her already.

“Okay.” The other girl nodded in submission and her reaction caught her off-guard. Was it that easy to get rid of her? “How about we grab something at Starbucks later? They say they have a new cheesecake that you can’t miss out on,” she chattered gleefully as if there hadn’t been a single thing that she should be ashamed of.

Luda felt a need to outright laugh at her but instead, she was merely disgusted. How could she have ever spent time with a girl like Ara? How could she have ever see her as someone kind, caring and sympathetic? Her so-called best friend couldn’t even see that she wanted nothing more than to evaporate and never see her pretty face again.

“Actually, I have−”

“I’ll see you at 5 then. At our usual table.” Ara winked at her and swiftly scampered away before Luda could even have the chance to protest. A huff of air left her nose in disbelief. She couldn’t believe that Ara was so blind. So adamant. So annoying.

So perfect. So flawless. So pretty. So skinny.

Small wonder how she could find herself in the closest Starbucks an hour later, waiting for Ara to arrive. She impatiently looked at the clock but she immediately wished that she didn’t. 20 minutes had passed since her best friend should have arrived and she was nowhere in sight. Not to mention that the seconds passed by more and more slowly and she was already fed up with waiting. After all, she wasn’t the one who wanted this conversation and now she was the one who was there? What kind of absurd situation she had gotten herself into?

As soon as she made up her mind and stood up, Ara beamingly plunked herself down in the seat in front of her.

“Sorry, I’m late, I know. I’ve just had a talk with one of the guys at campus and−” she explained hurriedly, using large gestures to indicate her truth. Luda didn’t feel like listening to her excuse, so she cut her off.

“Was it Jaejun?”

“What?” Ara’s eyes widened in surprise but her astonishment slowly turned into something else. It was fear.

“I asked if that guy was Jaejun.”

“Uhm, well,” she hesitated, scratching the back of her neck sheepishly, a bit torn between the idea of lying to her best friend or telling her truth, even though she was perfectly aware of the fact that it would her hurt, if not breaking her heart. “Yeah, it was him,” she admitted ashamedly. She averted her eyes elsewhere but Luda’s face because she couldn’t bear the apparent disappointment showing on her face.

“Of course.” She couldn’t help but scoff. “Who else would it be?” Luda muttered but her best friend could still hear it perfectly well. She didn’t care anymore, it wasn’t like she didn’t have the right to be angry at her.

“I wanted to tell you, Luda. I really wanted to but I just couldn’t find the appropriate time to say it. It’s not something that I should tell you in the middle of the busy corridors.”

“You’re right. It’s not,” she agreed fervently. She had to remind herself again and again to keep her composure in check and never show her real feelings. Never say her real thoughts out loud, the ones that were kept in the deepest forests of her heart, nourished by the voice in her head. They were raw and merciless. They were already tearing her apart. “But you had the weekend for that. I bet you knew that we broke up with Jaejun on Friday, so you should have given me a call by now. Yet, you didn’t,” she pointed it out in a small voice.

“I know and I’m sorry. I really am. But… you know, it’s not an easy thing to talk about,” Ara admitted bashfully, her words barely audible.

Luda wanted to laugh scornfully, but she couldn’t. She wouldn’t. After all, she had never showed her proper feelings not to hurt anyone, so how could this time be any different? She felt the need to punch a wall though. Hearing that it wasn’t an easy thing to talk about was the biggest lie she had ever heard. Ara used to handle situations like this so well. Even when she had kissed Luda’s first boyfriend while they were hads till been dating, she had confessed to her the moment it had happened. She hadn’t even blinked, she hadn’t even hesitated. So, what exactly had changed since then?

“We didn’t mean to fall in love,” her best friend protested. She bit her lower lip, a habit that she still couldn’t get rid of when she was embarrassed despite her overflowing confidence. “It just… somehow happened on the way.”

“It just somehow happened?” Luda repeated, not believing her ears. What nonsense was she babbling about? Falling in love with your best friend’s boyfriend can just happen on the way? Rubbish! “Since when did you two have a thing? Since the party at Taehyung’s?” she raised her eyebrows in question, the rage underlying behind her actions.

Ara gulped. She wasn’t ready for such hardships. She thought that it would go smoothly, Luda being as sympathetic as ever, and she wouldn’t have to worry about the consequences of falling in love with Jaejun. It seemed that it wasn’t as easy as she had initially planned.

“Yeah, actually, it was then when we first realised that we like each other and we wanted to tell you. I swear.”

“It was already a month ago!” Luda croaked, her voice a bit raspy. “If you had said something then, it wouldn’t hurt so much now. Maybe you could have actually saved me from Jaejun’s horrible comparing.”

“I’m sorry. I know he thinks that I’m a goddess or something but I didn’t ask him to compare you to me,” Ara emphasised the fact but to no avail. Her best friend merely rolled her eyes at her and huffed furiously. She decided that it was enough for her. If Luda was playing dirty, so would she. She assumed that the epitome of goodness and purity would also forget her sin and let her get away with it – like she always did before – but it turned out that things were different now. Maybe Luda grew up after all. “And you have to admit that it’s pretty childish to get so worked up about his words. He said the mere facts. I can’t do anything about the fact that we are different in so many ways. Like I’m outgoing or skinny and you’re not.”

The sentence was left hanging in the air for a moment. Luda would swear that she heard her heart breaking into dozens of pieces. She was already bleeding on the battlefield, why would Ara make things even more painful?

“I’ve had enough,” Luda mumbled under her nose hastily and rose from her seat but Ara emulated her reaction in an instant.

“I didn’t mean that you are fat. You are at a normal weight and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just that you always take it to heart when people comment on your appearance and I think you shouldn’t.”

Although it wasn’t meant to be rude, she felt like a bullet was sent to her heart. That’s what you wanted to hear, right? You are at a normal weight. But doesn’t normal equal fat? What do you think so? Doesn’t it sound like an insult to you? It was supposed to be a reassurance, so why do you think of it as something bad? Because you know she’s lying. She always did, you just pretended to believe them. After all, it’s still better to believe in lies than in nothing, right?

Luda needed a few moments to regain her composure and act as calm as possible. Her parents had always told her that it was better to remain composed even during arguments, so she tried her best to live up to their words.

“I don’t want to see you again,” Luda announced as she gritted her teeth in annoyance. She didn’t care that people took notice of her behaviour and threw looks at her. It wasn’t her who was the best guy in this story, and no matter how much her best friend wanted to make her stay by grabbing onto her wrist, she yanked her hand away from Ara’s. She really didn’t want to see her again.

When she stepped out of the busy place, the air felt suffocating. She felt like she was drowning and waves were crashing above her head. She couldn’t do anything to help her to the surface. She was already meters beneath the reality and she constantly got further and further away from help. Who was still there to save her?

I am here. And I will never leave your side. I promise that.

We’ve only just gotten started.

The days were slower and the nights were longer than Luda would have liked it. She was constantly in a war, both with the people in her life and both with her own feelings.

Deep down, she could understand why Jaejun had dumped her to choose Miss Perfect Park Ara over her. Really, she could. Ara was the epitome of flawlessness; she was skinny and pretty, she had a great sense of humour, she was so talkative that she could easily chat with anyone for hours, not to mention her bubbly and free personality. Everyone seemed to like her, she pulled people closer like a magnet. She fancied going out, she was literally a social butterfly but her heart always belonged to those who were the closest to her. In a nutshell, she was perfect.

Compared to her, what was she? A waste of space, to say the least. She was never as outgoing as her best friend, she rather enjoyed quiet nights spent at home with a cup of hot chocolate and a good book. She never considered herself funny, nor talkative. She wasn’t skinny either and to make matters worse, everyone made sure to emphasise that fact, too. She was certain that she wasn’t pretty and it didn’t even help when she replaced her glasses with contact lenses. Not to mention that she had tiny little freckles on her face and she had a scar on her chin which was still visible, even though she got it when she had been only 5. In a nutshell, she was the total opposite of Ara.

You were never enough. It’s time to change it. Now, you can be enough. Just lose some pounds and you’ll see it. You’ll feel better and people will like you. You will be more confident and you will start loving yourself. Trust me, I will help you.

She trusted that voice in her head. If she was able to prove herself that she was better than this, she would certainly be happier. After all, when someone is happy with herself, others will be happy when they are around her, right?

With that thought in mind, it wasn’t hard to make a change. She joined a gym near her flat and went there twice a week to do some fat-burning exercises. At university, she attended aerobics classes that she enjoyed whole-heartedly but she assumed that it wouldn’t be enough. Plus, those hours at the gym with sweating and pushing herself to her limits helped to distract her for a while. No more Jaejun, no more Ara. Just her mind and her body. The voice even encouraged her and it was kind of motivating. She did something for herself to help to move on and she truly enjoyed it. She took care of herself and her health, it was about nothing else at that time. She wanted to lose a couple of pounds but it was only an acceptable choice, not a life-threatening one.

It was after another exhausting session at the gym when she bumped into her handsome stranger again. She was sitting on the same bus, at the same spot, with different days behind her but with the same old feelings: hopelessness, loneliness and void. Although only two weeks passed, she was already trapped in a cage. Of course, without her or anyone else knowing. It was still a healthy way to approach heartbreak and major changes in life. It wasn’t an obsession. Not yet.

She was totally immersed into her thoughts when someone sat down beside her and started talking to her.

“Same bus, same time,” the voice called out and she had no choice but to turn her head to see who it was. Even without looking at him, she would have guessed that it was Jin, although they had met only once. He had a characteristically warm and soothing voice, she could easily identify it from thousands of other ones.

“Oh, Jin!” Luda’s eyes lit up brightly when their eyes met and Seokjin couldn’t even be happier. “It’s so good to see you. How are you?” she inquired curiously, her weariness from before totally disappearing thanks to the mere presence of the boy.

“I’m fine, thank you. And you?”

“I’m okay, thanks,” she stated with a radiant smile on her face. She felt so much better now that someone was beside her and that someone was Kim Seokjin himself. Last time, he had done so much for her, she wanted to properly thank him but didn’t have the chance since she had to get off before him. Now, it seemed that it was fate that they could meet again, therefore she didn’t want to let her chance slip away.

“Are you really okay?” Jin’s grin vanished in an instant and his expression became solemn again. His honey-like voice was laced with worry, his toffee-brown eyes filled with millions of shining stars, the ones that were her source of reassurance. They were sparkling, bathing in his affectionate and pouring her with love. Every time she looked into them, she felt like she was at a safe haven. He was her safe haven.

“Yes, really.” She nodded with an honest yet tired smile. During the last two weeks, she had been thinking a lot about her life and her choices – let it be her relationships, career goals and important milestones – and although she still wasn’t 100% over the break-up and the quarrel with Ara, she made a significant progress.

“Are you sure?” Jin suspiciously raised an eyebrow at her and not even a hint of mockery was present in his diamond-like orbs. “You can tell me if something’s wrong,” he offered gently, making her wonder how a guy like him could be real.

He wasn’t her relative, nor a friend, he was basically a nobody to her. Yet, he still kept in mind that last time she had been under the weather and wanted to make sure that she was better now. Her heart leaped a bit thanks to his thoughtfulness.

“Yes, I’m totally sure.” Luda nodded more and more fervently until Jin finally seemed convinced. Then, she shook her head in disbelief but couldn’t hide a smile that was creeping onto her face.

Seokjin was a literal angel for remembering the fact that she had been utterly devastated the last time they had met. Not all boys would act the same as him after such a first encounter but he was different. He didn’t even know that Jaejun had dumped her but he still offered to be her crying pillow. She couldn’t express how thankful she really was.

“But I couldn’t properly say thank you last time, so let me say it now.”

“No, no, you don’t have to,” the young man immediately cut her off but she would have lied if she had said that she wasn’t prepared for a similar reaction.

“No, really, I would like to say a massive thank you because you helped me a lot. I was going through a pretty hard time and you could cheer me up, so I’m really thankful,” Luda said it anyway because she was just too adamant to already give up. She was fed up with hiding her emotions and not saying out loud what she really wanted to say. After all, that was what partly led to her relationships falling apart. The other reason was that she was blind; she couldn’t see the signs in time. To be precise, she didn’t want to see the signs. “Is there a way that I can pay you back?”

“Oh no, you really don’t have to.” Jin shook his head. “I was happy that I could be there. It would have been a shame to let anyone sob silently in the back of the bus,” he casually confessed, making her totally baffled. She felt her cheeks heating up a bit and she would swear that her face was tinted pink, if not scarlet-red.

“Still, I feel like I have to thank you somehow,” she played the headstrong little girl who wouldn’t give up for the world but she really wanted to do something for him. Maybe they won’t meet again and she would feel just as ashamed as she did after they had first encountered. She had to seize the opportunity now. “I insist. Let me buy you a coffee or something. Then, you can leave me if you want but please, let me do it for you.”

She almost pleaded and Seokjin must have felt sorry for her because he gave in only a blink of an eye.

“Okay, I’m in. I can’t say no to such a great offer.” Jin clapped his hands in excitement and an enthusiastic grin was making its way onto his face. He was naturally attractive but when he smiled like that… oh no, Luda had a hard time keeping her composure in check. “One of my friends actually has a café just around the corner if you wish to give it a try,” he suggested and she couldn’t have anything against his idea. She mentally patted her shoulder because she had decided to take a bath at the gym’s bathroom before he bumped into Jin and didn’t want to get home to get changed. Now, it would be embarrassing to go out with her in her casual training clothes and sweaty body.

As there was really nothing that she could come up with, she gave him a thumbs-up and they headed to the café of Seokjin’s friend’s.

The Hope Café was a pretty, cosy place with lots of radiant colours, the walls decorated with breathtaking pictures from all around the world, classical jazz music playing in the background and grinning waiters and waitresses running back and forth.

At first, Luda was actually taken aback. It was nothing like the good old Starbucks with its highly modernised facilities, that typical green and brown interior design and annoyed stuff who were angry when someone wasn’t speaking loud enough. It was different yet refreshing. It felt a bit like home.

“Oh, Jin! You finally brought your girlfriend! How lovely!”

A joyful male voice hollered from behind the cash register and started walking towards them. He was a guy at around their age with average height, a casual, boy-next-door look and a happy vibe. She had never seen such a wide smile before, he smiled like he didn’t have any problems and everything was fine and unicorns still existed. He seemed so at ease.

Upon hearing his remark, she couldn’t cover up her bafflement. What? Did he just mention the word ‘girlfriend’? Oh no, he might have mistaken her for someone else! Even if it would mean that Seokjin had a girlfriend, she still wanted to clarify herself but Jin was faster than her.

“Actually, she’s not my girlfriend,” the young man explained with an apologetic smile while his friend pouted a bit, his smile wavering.

“You usually don’t bring girls here, so I thought that maybe, you finally got one for yourself,” he explained with sad puppy eyes but clapped his hands in the next moment. “Never mind, I’m happy that you decided to bring her here and I will make sure to keep her entertained.” He playfully winked at her, the russet-brown haired guy merely rolling his eyes in response. “I’m Jung Hoseok, by the way. I’m Jin’s friend and flatmate,” he turned to face Luda and offered a handshake. She took it without hesitation and made an attempt to give an introduction without making a fool out of herself.

“I’m Choi Luda. I’m−” she started speaking but closed her mouth shut when she realised that she had no idea how to define their relationship. They weren’t even friends, maybe not even acquaintances. But then, what were they?

“We met a few weeks ago on the bus when I tried to console her because she seriously looked like she needed company. Today, we also bumped into each other when we took the same bus and she wanted to thank me for what I had done last time, so she wanted to get me a coffee. Then, I mentioned visiting your café and she said yes.”

“You are at the best place for hot drinks, I can guarantee that!” Hoseok announced gleefully, making a casually passing by customer slightly jump in surprise. “We have the best ones in Seoul and we have such a wide range, I’m certain that your jaw will drop at the sight of our menu. Here, just take a look!” He shove a menu into her hands and while searching through all the drinks and snacks mentioned on the paper, Luda came to realise that Hoseok was right.

They indeed had a wide range of goodies offered. They even had their own unique and quite creative names – like the hot chocolate made from white chocolate and topped with whipped cream and nuts called as the Lovely White Cloud or the triple-chocolate brownie with vanilla ice cream called as the Chocolate Monster and his Sweet Vanilla – that she couldn’t help but boost a smile at such an extraordinary concept.

“So, what do you want?” Hoseok inquired after a minute or so of her examining the menu, the tiny voice in her head reminding her of the calories in those sweet desserts and drinks.

You need to work out tomorrow to compensate for your little cheating. Even though it’s only once in a while, you still can’t let go of control. You just can’t. If you do, you know you will be more miserable. If you hadn’t let things go in their way, you wouldn’t have gotten yourself into this horrible situation. Not letting go of control is the key.

“Ladies first!” Seokjin immediately flashed a smile and looked at her patiently, although she assumed that he had already tried all of the different variations since it was his friend’s café.

“Then, I would like to have a cup of Caramel Dream with the Strawberry&Lemon Rendez-vous,” she decided, trying to shake the unwanted thoughts off and focusing on the present instead of worrying about what would happen to her body if she drank and ate all she had ordered before.

A moment later, Jin also gave his order, and so Hoseok disappeared like he hadn’t even been there in the first place and they sat down at a window-table. Seokjin was a real gentleman, not only did he help her with her coat and put both of their clothes on the coat rack but he also pulled out her chair before seating himself. And they weren’t even in a fancy restaurant but a cosy café!

“Hoseok seems like a nice guy,” Luda commented after thanking him for his kindness because she was still taken aback by the fact that Jung Hoseok was literally a ray of sunshine. She had never met anyone like him before.

“He’s a great guy. Small wonder he’s my friend.”

“How did you two meet?” she asked curiously, resting her elbows on the table and chin in her hands. The russet-brown haired guy was more than happy to answer her question and slowly, without them realising, their conversation went on and on.

As time went by, it wasn’t a nervous tip-toeing anymore and they didn’t only talk about the cliché topics that people bring up on their second encounter. But of course, they talked about hobbies, friends, family and studies as well. Luda’s jaw dropped when she actually learned that Seokjin was studying Art History and he wished to be either a curator or a teacher. In his free time, he loved to do sketches and little drawings but he made sure to let her know that he wasn’t good, he merely enjoyed it. She asked him to let her see at least one of his works and she whined until he didn’t give in.

The more they talked, the better she could suppress that little voice in her head. At first, it was screaming at her when her strawberry-lemon cheesecake and caramel-flavoured hot chocolate arrived but she ignored it. She had such a fun time with Seokjin that she totally forgot about the voice’s warning and she could fully enjoy herself. The guy was a fun and lovable companion, she laughed so much and it was for real. She didn’t have to force a smile, neither pretend to be interested because she was obviously interested. There was still so much she wanted to know about him!

Sadly, the hours flew by so quickly that it was already time to go home. Seokjin insisted on taking her home but she needed to do some grocery shopping, so she had to say no to his offer.

“Maybe next time,” she tried to cheer him up with a reassuring smile as they were walking down the streets to his bus stop. The stars in the boy’s toffee-brown eyes immediately lit up.

“So, is there a next time?” He raised his eyebrows in question, his tone a bit cautious. Luda tried her best to hide her embarrassment because she didn’t intend to be obvious, the words just slipped out of her mouth. Nevertheless, there was no use of crying over spilled milk, the words already said out loud.

“I guess.”

“Great!” Seokjin slightly jumped in delight and his adorable reaction triggered a joyful laugh from her, quietly leaving her rosy-coloured lips. “How about next Friday?” he inquired excitedly. She was pretty sure that she didn’t have anything scheduled for next Friday, so she agreed but they exchanged numbers just to make sure.

“Then, I’ll see you next Friday,” Seokjin waved as he was hopping on the bus and Luda happily waved back.

“Next Friday,” she repeated and watched as his bus was getting further and further away. As a goodbye present, she got another flying kiss from him. From that moment on, he couldn’t stop smiling until her way back to her flat.

The good feelings went away quickly, and no matter how hard Luda tried, she couldn’t forget about that piece of cake and that hot chocolate. She thought that she shouldn’t have let herself indulge in treats like this because if she did so once, then how many would follow? When would she be able to stop? Maybe others could do it, but she couldn’t. She needed to take control over her life, she needed to take control over herself or else the world would take control over her, and she would never ever let that happen again.

So she listened to the voice in her head, telling her to cut back here and there, her grocery list reducing when she next went to buy food for herself and her thoughts more and more occupied with food and exercising and calories. She started tracking the calories she consumed - both edible and drinkable forms -, so that it could give her a sense of control, so that she could feel like she could monitor what was going on in her life.

It did actually give her a sense of satisfaction, to know exactly what and how much she consumed, and she felt happy, content, joyful even because she thought that it could work. The voice in her head prompted her, motivated her to keep going, so eventually when she went to meet Jin the next Friday, she only drank a cup of hot tea, telling him that she had eaten before, so she was fine. He seemed to believe her, and it was just so easy to get away with it, she felt almost thrilled.

Besides, Jin was a lovely guy. He was very understanding, had a sense of humour she had definitely needed since her break-up and drifting apart from Ara too, and he always had such funny stories to tell, it was insane. She listened to his stories attentively, genuinely smiling and laughing along with him, the fact that she was skipping out on her lunch long forgotten. He was a good company, he could even make her forget about not eating, and it was alright.

She couldn’t quite know what to expect from that encounter though because she wasn’t sure that she could be interesting enough for Jin, so that he would want to meet her again, but eventually, he did so, and they agreed that they would meet again next time when both of their schedules would allow them to do so. As both of them were diligent university students at different universities and having different majors, they were bound to have clashing schedules, but they made it work and stayed in contact through messaging each other.

She had to admit that his food pictures were a bit triggering though, but she tried to go with usual lines such as ‘looks good’ and ‘hope you enjoy your food’ instead of commenting what they contained and how much calories he would consume by eating those. Eventually, she found herself looking up labels for the ingredients and nutrition lists and she looked up countless websites, searching for the best possible combinations of food that could help her by eating less.

Apart from going to the gym, looking up such facts took up most of her time, so she didn’t have more time to spend on her hobbies because she needed to study as well and work on assignments. She didn’t care though; as long as she could make sure that she was aware what she was doing to her body, it would be alright. It would be just a phase anyway, right?

The voice didn’t leave her. In fact, it became stronger and stronger as time went by, becoming her only friend after Ara had messed up their friendship so badly. Luda couldn’t tell whether she was glad or disappointed that the other girl didn’t even try to contact her after she had told her that she wouldn’t want to see her again, but it was how it was nevertheless, and losing a childhood best friend so abruptly definitely had its impact on her. She started feeling suffocated around strangers, always seeking out what flaws they could point out in her, and always questioning their motives. She didn’t want to fall into the same trap she had done so with Ara and Jaejun, but it meant that she didn’t even want to let anyone close to her. At least, not so soon.

The seed of doubt had been planted in her when it came to Jin as well, but they had already agreed on a time and a place for their next encounter, so she didn’t want to let him down, and she wanted to see if it would work out with her situation because Jin was really a great guy, and she couldn’t help but think that he was being genuine whenever he was around her, but she couldn’t tell anymore. She had thought the same about Ara and Jaejun as well, and look where she ended up at.

However, meeting Jin was really like the highlight of her day and the weeks behind her, the constant anxiousness and doubtful thoughts burying her joy and making her wary of meeting others. Though with Jin, it was almost easy to forget about her hardships because they could talk about so many things including her not so good relationship with her parents, the perks of sharing his flat with someone else, his newfound love for cooking or even just the bookstores she liked visiting in Seoul. They didn’t talk only about university, and it made her feel like so much more than just someone who wanted to be a straight A student to prove everyone that she was worthy and that she was a good person.

On the other hand, he picked up the fact that she hadn’t ordered any food, only a glass of still water and inquired the reason behind it. Luda tried to put on her best, most convincing smile when she spoke up.

“I’m not hungry.” She shook her head, lying, so that he wouldn’t ask about her way of eating. He probably wouldn’t understand anyway. It was just her and the voice. They were the ones knowing what it was about.

“Are you okay?” Jin kept insisting though, his mesmerizing, toffee-brown eyes searching for confirmation in her own orbs. She almost felt bad for telling him a fib when he looked like that. When he looked like he really cared about her. “You look a bit pale and sick. Are you coming down with something?” he inquired gently, even lowering his voice as if it could be a secret, but she just shrugged off his question. She had lost weight, but it was alright. She was doing well, she thought that she was the healthiest she had ever been.

“Oh, it’s just usual uni stress,” she reasoned casually, and while it was partly true, it was also partly a lie. The university workload did contribute to her perfectionism acting up even more, but she was managing well so far, she had performed really well on her tests and presentations so far, so she got it. But it needed to stay the same, so that she would feel okay.

“Okay, then. Let me know though if anything’s up. I may not be as good of a listener as my psychologist friend, but I’m here to listen if it’s about anything,” Jin chattered, his shoulders slumping in ease. He probably believed her words from the way he looked back at her, and even though she was thankful, she didn’t know if it was a good thing.

So even if he emptied his plate and mug and she left the empty glass of the still water on the table, he didn’t seem to want to pressure the topic anymore, and she was glad. She almost felt like as if she had been caught when she hadn’t been doing anything wrong in the first place.

Or at least, she didn’t think so, and that was the worst out of all; that she was no longer herself and she was no longer able to tell what was good and bad for her.

Weeks went by and then a month and then another month, and Luda found herself finding excuses to meet Jin because even just the thought of going out and feeling the pressure to eat the foods with unknown calories scared her so much that she would not only stick to her own safe foods that she knew the calories of, but she wouldn’t go to her favourite bakery either or go to group work meetings when it took place at a bar or restaurant, and she wouldn’t go out and eat because food was there, and she needed to know what and when and how much she would eat, so she could keep track of it alongside her weight.

It slowly became like a habit; weighing herself in the morning and at night, and sometimes during the day when she felt like she needed to and the voice prompted her to do so. She always had a mixed reaction whenever she saw the numbers on the scale because she might have been losing weight, but she never felt like it was enough or it was good. If it went up, then she would cut back even more, but even if the number went down, she would cut back as well. Because it was kind of satisfying to see how her efforts paid off, and how she really got it under control. She might not be able to control anything else from her own family to her ex-boyfriend or best friend, but she could control this. And it felt good.

The more time passed, the less she could exercise though because after failing a test, something in her broke, and she decided to spend the time in the gym on studying, so that she wouldn’t fall behind and end with a bad grade. She couldn’t afford to do so, she just couldn’t! She was a straight A student! What would her parents think? Would they compare her to Ara again? Would they compare her to her little sister again? What would her teachers think? She was better than this, she was so much better.

So having more time to spend on studying, she actually had more time to think about food because it really became constant; thinking about what and when and how much to eat. It was always going through her head, reminding her of her goals, and when she felt hungry between her planned meal times, she tried to suppress her hunger by drinking huge amounts of water or chewing bubble gums.

What was interesting though that now that Jin couldn’t even see her, it was only her flatmate - Inna - who could see her from time to time and inquire about her well-being. Though after listening to her worrying questions twice, Luda started hiding her body in baggy clothes, so that no one could see if she had gained or lost weight, only her and that ugly, judging mirror in her room that laughed at her every single night when all she could still see was fat. Would it ever be enough? The image looking back from the mirror?

As much as Inna was kind, Luda couldn’t appreciate her acts, not anymore.

“Look what I’ve found in the store today!” Inna announced as she entered their flat and Luda was just passing by with a glass of water in her hands. Again. She didn’t know anymore how much she had already drank, but probably not enough for the way she could still not suppress her hunger.

The girl then proceeded to show her the little bottled liquid with a wide smile.

“Your favourite brand! I know you’ve said a while ago that you couldn’t find it, but now I found it at this corner store not far from my uni,” Inna explained beamingly, and she reached out the bottle to Luda, watching as she hesitantly took it.

“Thank you, but you shouldn’t have done so,” she remarked with a forced smile. She wanted to tell her that she wouldn’t drink the chocolate milk anyway because it wouldn’t fit into her daily calories and food rules, but Inna’s wide smile stopped her from saying anything like that.

“Oh come on! You immediately came to my mind when I saw this, so drink it well!” Her flatmate suggested kindly before disappearing into the kitchen to pack out the other groceries she had gotten from the store.

Luda looked at the bottle in her hands, her heart wanting to drink it so desperately and her stomach even grumbling at the sight, but she couldn’t do it, not when the voice said otherwise. It wasn’t part of her plans, she couldn’t consume it, it would mess up everything, and then she would be out of control yet again. She couldn’t do so. Not anymore.

So she retreated into her room, closed the door behind her and put the glass of water on her table and threw the bottle of choco milk into her trash bin. She had to get rid of it as soon as possible.

Winter arrived quickly and with that, the snowy and windy weather became more and more prominent, forcing Luda to dress as warmly as possible, but the cold didn’t seem to go away. No matter how many layers she wore or if she had the heat on or not, she was cold. Always. Looking down at her bluish fingers and the remains of bloody patches reminding her of how the skin had come off there before, she told herself that it must have been because it was a particularly extreme winter, and she had always been a bit sensitive to cold, so maybe it was just worse this time.

She could put up with it, she tried to do so. The voice told her that she was strong enough for that, so she pulled through, applied body lotion and hand creams ever so frequently, but they didn’t seem to help a lot. Not as much as she had thought so, but it was fine, she reassured herself, hoping for the winter season to go away quickly.

Soon, the cold didn’t seem that outstanding anymore. It had become a part of her very much long and very much uneventful days. The same happened day by day; going to lectures, studying, measuring food, writing down calories, stepping on the scale to weigh herself, drinking excessive amount of water to suppress her hunger, and waiting for the day to end, so that she could go to sleep even if it meant tossing and turning in bed most of the time. She sometimes woke up in the middle of the night, feeling ravenous, and she sometimes couldn’t even close her eyes. The daylight had become just as much of a nightmare as her nights, sheddings of hair on her pillow welcoming her every single morning.

She convinced herself though that she was doing okay, she was exercising well despite being more and more out of breath whenever she wanted to exercise or even just walking the stairs, and she was eating foods that were said to be healthy, she just controlled what she ate. She didn’t care how much she needed to lie or how many occasions she needed to turn down if it meant that she could stick to her own routine and be in control of her actions.

Seokjin also inquired if she wanted to meet up before Christmas, and Luda didn’t know why, but she was so frustrated at how he still tried to cling onto her. She couldn’t get it, he was just too good and too perfect for her, why would someone like him want to spend time with someone like her?

“Sorry. I haven’t told you, but the day you met me, I was crying because my boyfriend broke up with me. I need time and space to move on and focus on myself. Please, understand.”

It was her way of saying that she had no idea why he would want to meet her again and to separate him from herself because that wouldn’t end well anyway. She didn’t trust others as much as before, but she didn’t know if she could even trust herself anymore. What had changed though? Life had been so cruel to her, she had it altogether, and then everything had fallen apart.

“I’m sorry to hear that. Of course, I’ll let you have your space and time. You can reach out to me anytime you want to though. I’m here if you just need someone to talk to,” said Jin through a message, and no matter how kind it seemed, Luda didn’t want to reply to it anymore. She just wanted to put everything in the past, and live day by day, obeying the rules of the voice in her head.

Inna was the only one who seemed genuinely worried about her, and who asked if she was feeling okay, but Luda had already become accustomed to lying people and convincing them that she was already over Jaejun and doing well. She was eating, she said, it was just the stress, she said. She couldn’t tell them how overwhelming it was if she couldn’t do what the voice told her to do so, how much she felt out of control. She couldn’t, she couldn’t let it happen again. She couldn’t disappoint others and herself. She needed to be strong.

However, with her semester over and the excuse to go home during the short winter break, she was almost obligated to go home between her semesters, and she couldn’t have been more frustrated.

She had never been on good terms with her family, they had always expected so much of her and belittled her efforts, and no matter how much she tried to live up to their expectations, she had never gotten genuine feedback. It was expected of you, her parents said, show a good example to your little sister, they said. When she had messed up something (anything), then came the questions why and how it could have happened.

She always looked up to her parents and she was always grateful for what they had given her, but they had never been there for her emotionally, and she felt so alone even if they were around her. She had always tried to deny it, telling everyone just how much of a loving family she had, but they had never really listened to her, all the attention went to her little sister, and she was just expected to do well.

So to be controlled by them in another way - them telling her what to eat -, she felt out of control again, and it showed. She barely left her room saying that she needed to take care of something for her next semester which was a blatant lie, but they wouldn’t care anyway as long as she had gotten good grades and they could show her off as an example of their perfect parenting.

Only meal times were a struggle this way, but they were literal hell. She didn’t eat carbs, so she left out the side dishes and noodles they had prepared and indeed opted for the vegetables and other garnishes, hoping that they wouldn’t notice, having perfectly mastered the art of cutting her food into little pieces, drinking a lot between bites and eating slowly, so that it would seem like she took a long time to eat because she had eaten a lot. Usually, it had worked.

However, this time, her mother couldn’t let it go.

“Why are you picking on your food?” The woman looked at her after basically monitoring what she had been doing, just because she had no other topic to focus on because Luda’s little sister wasn’t talkative this time either. She was preparing for her senior year exams diligently, and the closer the date was, the more after school activities she had, so she was more tired than usually.

Luda took in a deep breath and answered without even thinking of telling them the truth. The lie slipped through as easily as if it would have been the truth. She almost believed it herself.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Is it because of Jaejun? Do you want to appeal to him by not eating?” Her father asked firmly, making her furrow her eyebrows in question. Really? That was the first question he could have asked? Doing it to appeal to a boy? Her ex-boyfriend out of all? It had already been difficult for her to tell her family the truth, but to take advantage of her honesty this way?

“Do you think I’m that kind of girl?” Luda scoffed, her voice raised due to the frustration that was slowly building up from the inside, yet her mother was ever so quick to tell her off for raising her voice at his father.

“Luda! It was just a simple question,” she tried to reason, giving her daughter a side-glance that she took with a frown. It had always been like this; if they threw offensive remarks at her and she told her own opinion or dared to show her feelings, they would get defensive and blame her for hurting them or blame her for overreacting. On the other hand, if she tried to play it save, suddenly she was ungrateful and neutral. She had never been enough. Never.

“No, I don’t want to appeal to him or anyone,” Luda said, but what she really wanted to say was that she just wanted to have control over her life. They wouldn’t understand that though. Every single time she had been just a tiny bit sad or disappointed, they had told her to cheer up and just relax. They had never been there to listen to her worries unlike they had done so with her little sister. Because her little sister had always cried to get their attention, and it had been enough for them to listen to her.

“You aren’t eating dinner either, mom,” Luda pointed out with an edge to her words, but her mother shrugged it off. Like everything.

“I heard it’s not good for the body,” she reasoned, almost as obviously lying as one could be, but everyone seemed to drop the topic for her mother’s sake because they knew she had never been confident in her body, and started asking Luda about her studies instead.

It was always like this; if there was nothing else to talk about, came her studies. Not the way she was feeling, not how scared or happy or content she was with how the semester had gone or if she had been looking forward to the next one. It had always been about those results and classes excluding her emotions, and that hurt the most. It felt like silently screaming whenever she was beside them and didn’t say a thing about what was going on inside.

That dinner went by horribly slowly, but even that was better than when her little sister had pointed out her weight loss when she had accidentally opened the door on Luda when she had been in the bathroom and told their parents, her mother’s only comment being:

“I wish I could have your will-power,” she mentioned almost in awe, and in that moment, Luda understood that they would never get it. Never.

Even those few days she had spent at home had been enough to make her restrict even more and compensate for eating with her family and eating those foods she hadn’t been familiar with. Going back to weighing herself and tracking her calories were more crucial than ever before, and with the new semester starting, it became like a project to her to keep pushing, to keep up with it.

She didn’t care that she isolated herself from people, she didn’t care that she was always feeling cold despite winter turning into spring and spring turning into summer, having trouble sleeping, having a huge set of rigid rules when it came to foods and she was obsessively trying to follow those, she didn’t care her period hadn’t come for months, she didn’t care her hair was falling out, her nails were brittle, her skin was dry and bloody patches covered the surface because she convinced herself that she was the healthiest she had ever been. She didn’t care about the symptoms even if they were there because she thought that they were just temporary and had nothing to do with the way she was eating.

She kept going with whatever the voice wanted from her even though it didn’t feel like a friend anymore. If anything, it was an abusive one. An authoritative one. Nothing was ever enough for the voice either, but then again, when had she been ever enough for people? That voice was just another voice she couldn’t please, so she kept trying and trying until that voice seemed to have won.

Luda didn’t know how it happened, once she felt a bit dizzy while walking from her room to the bathroom and she felt her legs going weak and darkness embracing her and then the next thing she saw was light and blinding lamps, white walls and a doctor in a gown beside her. He kept asking her questions after saying that her pulse was dangerously low, and whenever she didn’t want to answer, Inna was there to answer what she knew of.

Luda kind of figured out that she must have fainted and it had been Inna who had called the ambulance, but she didn’t understand why was she still there, so she let Inna speak, and when the food topic came up, Luda was quick to protest.

“No, I eat, really. I’m the healthiest I’ve ever been,” she tried to reason, but the doctor shook his head.

“A lot of eating disorder patients say so and end up in a hospital because they fainted from the lack of food,” he enlightened her firmly, his words truly shaking her. She glanced at Inna as well, but she only gave her a bitter smile in return. Did she believe the doctor’s words? “Eating disorders are deadly, and with your pulse, it’s a surprise you have never fainted, and it’s a miracle that your heart is still beating,” the man added neutrally, and if anything, this kind of information shook her to the core even more.

Luda tried to process what she had heard, but she couldn’t. She just couldn’t accept it. It was ridiculous. She was alive and well, wasn’t she? She was doing well, she was eating, her heart was still beating, why would she die? Why would her pulse be low? But then again, why did she feel so ashamed? As if a secret of hers had been revealed? This complexity was giving her a headache, a painful one, a really painful one. She felt like she was splitted between the voice in her head and her own voice. It was the first time she felt like this ever since that voice had been born.

“No, I don’t have an eating disorder.” She shook her head fervently, that voice in her head screaming, yelling angrily at her for ever getting there, for ever getting a doctor question what she was doing. It was angry this time, and even though it had become more and more angry lately, Luda had never felt so afraid and so ashamed at the same time. Could they… could they be right?

“I’m fine,” she continued repeating herself until the tears started flooding and she had no more strength to obey the voice, letting Inna give her a hug and tell her that she would be there for her. The voice continued screaming and blaming and pointing its finger at her, making her cry out loud even more.

She lost, she knew it. The voice had always been stronger than her, and she had lost against it.

In fact, she had been losing ever since it had been born.

Everything happened so fast after the realization; a proper eating disorder specialist was assigned to her at the hospital, they ran some more health checks on her and gave her the diagnosis with guidelines for outpatient care because otherwise she would need to go inpatient and no matter what, she felt like she couldn’t give up on her studies. She was given nutritional advice and a meal plan, she was given a psychologist’s contact as well, her first appointment already settled, and by the time she left the hospital, she felt so weak and exhausted that she just wanted to sleep, but she couldn’t.

Inna was there to remind her that she should eat, and despite the fact that it was extremely difficult with that voice in her head screaming at her, she realized that she didn’t want to die. No. It had never been about wanting to die although by the end she had really felt like dying, she just wouldn’t admit it. She had felt so alone, and at least that voice had been there for her to comfort her, and it had really felt like it had become a friend. Until it hadn’t.

But no, she didn’t want to die. She might not have had a loving family or lots of friends or anything, but she still had dreams and things she wanted to accomplish, and just the thought of dying… it scared her. It scared her more than she would admit, so even if she was eating through tears, she did eat dinner that night, followed by a night of reading upon eating disorders and hers specifically - anorexia nervosa.

She indeed found articles about anorexia sufferers dying from their symptoms because their organs had stopped working properly and their hearts had stopped. It was so terrifying that Luda found herself crying again; a constant reaction ever since she had been told that she might have an eating disorder, and she had to realize that she had been holding back these tears all these time. She had never once cried ever since her break-up with Jaejun almost a year before, and it had come back all at once. She had convinced herself that she was fine and that she was doing well when really, she had never been sicker in her life, and people hadn’t even noticed. Her mother had even said that she had wished she could have her will-power, one horrible family encounter following another horrible one after that specific time.

She cried herself to sleep that night, hating the fact that things had gotten so out of control when she had been so convinced that she had been in control of her life, and hating herself, her life and that fucking voice in her head that made her feel like she couldn’t stop, but at least, she now knew that it was a problem, and if she wanted to live, she had to go against that voice.

Oh, how she wished it would have been that easy to just think that she could do it and then do it, but no. The first few days were okay, but then came the guilt and then restricting again, and then came the guilt for not eating well and then the cycle went on, eventually interrupted by the therapy sessions that did seem to help actually. At first, she was so damn scared to speak up and she just wanted to shrug it off, saying that she was doing better, she didn’t need help, but then the psychologist asked about her feelings, her real feelings, she asked about her relationships and family and childhood memories, and Luda once again had to realize that she had been deceiving herself all along.

That she had indeed never had the emotional support she had needed when she had been growing up, and that it showed in her low self-esteem, self-hatred and distorted body image. That she had always tried to suppress her feelings even when her boyfriend had dumped her and when her best friend hadn’t even wanted to confess to what had happened with Jaejun. She had tried so hard to always put others first that she had lost herself all along, her feelings buried under the pressure and her need to please others and to not hurt them, yet again triggered by what her parents had taught her, especially in relation to her younger sister.

Then again, that comparison with her younger sister and Luda not being the favourite child also came to surface, and she had never cried more than during that specific therapy session, finally seeing the situation for what it was and not just brushing it off, saying that it didn’t hurt her. Because it did, it always did. She just didn’t want to seem like an ungrateful child because she got a roof above her head, her parents paid for her tuition fees and they were doing well financially, so she couldn't have complained about those, but the emotional part… It had been lacking all along, and no matter how much she yearned for it, no matter how much she had tried to please her parents, she had always been pushed to the side as the second child.

“Eating disorders can manifest in many forms, but a lot of patients are actually silently struggling and yearning for love, acceptance and control, the people around them just wouldn’t notice or understand,” her psychologist told her when Luda apologized for crying, and the middle-aged woman tried to do everything in her power to make her feel better by telling her that it was okay to cry and what she was feeling was completely understandable.

“They never noticed. My mom even said that she wished she could have my will-power,” she admitted between sobs, getting the words out feeling a bit deliberating. She had never dared to say anything bad about her parents to others, but it felt like a wall had been broken down, and then many others followed.

The interesting thing about therapy was that after a while, Luda started getting more and more memories back as they were talking about certain topics, and it was odd, but her psychologist told her that those were the so-called repressed memories that might have been buried in the back of her mind because of the idea that her parents were perfect and that they had always been there for her when in reality they hadn’t been and these memories unlocked some hidden parts of her mind and of her hurt. Therefore, coming to terms with such situations definitely helped her to move on with her recovery, and therapy seemed useful.

Although just like with everything, there were always good and bad ones. In the beginning, there were a lot more bad days than good days, but it was because she knew that what she had been doing was wrong, and she hadn’t known before how to go against the voice, so she needed to learn it now. Not suppressing her emotions was also difficult because it was emotionally very much draining to realize just how many emotions she could feel and how overwhelming they could be.

Inna also became a great support to her, and even though Luda needed to be the one to save herself, she needed to be the one to pick up the food and eat it and deal with the emotions afterwards, having someone who had seen her at the worst, yet stayed by her side and tried to understand her was so reassuring because she knew she wasn’t alone.

“You know, I may not understand what you are going through, but anorexia is a serious mental illness, and it’s not an extreme diet like others say. So really, I’m so proud of you, and I’m always here if you need someone. Never ever think that you’re a burden,” Inna told her once when Luda was doubting why she had stayed by her side, and she gave her a thankful smile in return, but it wasn’t enough to show her gratitude. But she was trying. “I’m glad to see you smile again,” she added with a smile herself, and even though this wasn’t even a compliment, Luda felt like it was, and she felt almost teary hearing her words.

Some people seemed to be able to get why even smiling was a big thing.

Many relapses happened afterwards, and it didn’t help either that Luda’s parents didn’t think that it was more than an extreme diet and kept asking about her weight and kept telling her not to go to therapy because she didn’t have big enough of a problem, but she couldn’t care anymore. She put herself first and still pulled through with it because she knew how much she needed any help she could get and she knew it was about so much more than just food.

However, there was one person who actually came back into her life, and she was taken aback when she received a message from him, but when Jin asked if she was doing well, she found herself telling him about her mental health struggles, and told him that if he could wait a bit more, she would come out of it better Then, as someone who had a psychologist friend, Jin tried his best to support her even through messages, and eventually, they met up at the Hope Café again after Jin had asked her dozens of times if it was alright for her to eat out and whether she would feel uncomfortable.

She did feel a bit uncomfortable, but she knew that if she didn’t give it a try, the voice would win, and she didn’t want that, so she gritted her teeth, met the young man and let herself be fully concentrated on what he said instead of what she was eating.

“I’ve tried to ask my friend and look up what to say to someone with an eating disorder when they are eating, so I just want to say I’m really proud of you, every bite must be difficult for you, yet you are here, and you keep trying. That must require such strength and bravery on your part. You are the real fighter here,” Jin mentioned totally seriously, and Luda found herself absolutely speechless.

It was one thing that Inna who had taken her to the hospital after her fainting said similar things, but someone from whom she had isolated herself, someone who could have easily forgotten about her and someone who had never been forced to ask his psychologist friend or look up what eating disorders were about did so… It was truly heartwarming.

“Thank you, Jin. Really. I-I…” She tried to find the words to say, but she had no idea if words could portray what she was feeling. “Not everyone would take the time to look up such things, so I’m more than thankful.”

It might not have been easy to be around him and to believe that he was genuine, but she tried her best, and the more time passed, the more she realized that he was as genuine and understanding as one could be. Opening up to someone was always difficult, even more so with her struggles, but as time went by, she realized that it wasn’t a weakness to lean on others and others didn’t find her a burden when she was talking about her worries and hardships, and that some people would really just be there for her even if they weren’t family.

Though not until she actually learned to love herself, could she believe that others could love her, but after that, it became a bit easier to be around people and to be in her own skin. She also had to realize that life couldn’t be measured in numbers or expectations or others’ opinions or academic achievements, but in smiles, laughter, dreams, hopes and in the genuine love of people who were there for her including herself.

#bts scenarios #bts imagines #jin scenarios #jin imagines #bts drama #jin drama #bts angst #jin angst #bts #jin #my story #restlessmaknae

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vake-hunter · 5 years ago

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Heart’s Desire Lore Post

[All of my Ambition lore can be found in this google doc]

The Marvelous

This is protocol: when a player wins, they depart. A new candidate is found, or occasionally, like your delecterious self, presents themselves." Pages lets out a long faux-melancholy sigh. "The rest of us must keep playing, of course. Victory is the only escape."

“When a winner expresses their heart's desire, we – that is the Masters – gather, and turn all our ingenuities and resourcements to its fulfilment. If it is possible, we shall grant it. We have never failed yet. After all, we have moved cities in pursuit of desire. I fear to be immodest, but our capabilities are significant."

The Deck is, at first, very normal. Until, as Pages says, “the unfortunate business of expense, deadly journeys, etcetera, can begin."

"They must be consecrated, naturalously, in the Kingdom of the Is-Not.”

Discuss the venue. Where is the best place to hold the Honour? “"The venue must be somewhere that all the players can agree on.” The answer to everyone's needs is Arbor.

The standard set of Cats, Rats, Bats and Hats. Then there are the trumps: the trinity of face cards which tops each suit: the Jacks, smiling and stern, the Queens, sober and wild, the Kings, magisterial and melancholy. Each face is unique to its suit, a Tiger for a Jack of Cats, a Master for a King of Bats.

First played in the Third City

The cards are a recent convention. It changes with the fashion of the cities.

Seven players, always. Every five or ten years – the date depends on certain astrological conjunctions, written in the roof.

Rules

Each hand you pay an initial ante (7 coins) and are dealt a hand of cards. You then chose to call (pay the current bet), raise (double the current bet) or fold (lose your current stake, and the hand, but bet no more coins).

Each game is played in a series of hands, during which you stake some of your First City Coins. Hands are compared, with different combinations of cards have different values. At the end of each hand, the winner takes the loser's stake. When one player's coins are gone, they lose the game. In its essence, it is not dissimilar to poker – a fact which the Custodian claims is no coincidence.

Gradually, you learn about the legal combinations of cards. How First Fall beats Second, but both are trumped by the Perfidy of Sisters. About the complex interactions between the Parliament of Rats, the Tragedy Procedure, and the Four Crowns.

On the faintest and most coyly-worded of tablets, you study the forbidden hand: the Thing in the Well, which is mentioned nowhere else, and which loses to all other hands but one.

Then you move on to the esoteric rules that govern as yet undiscovered combinations. The Conspiracies: the matching of key cards to increase their value – or decrease the value of an opponent's hand. You learn to avoid the Treachery of Seven, which renders aces lower than sevens. You struggle to understand the Footsteps of Salt, a rule which has never been interpreted the same way twice.

The Thing in the Well wins only against All Manner of Things.

If you run out of coins, you can stake something else. If your opponent accepts, you may play one more hand. All or nothing. They call it the Chance.

rules forbid excessive drunkenness unless the Debauchery of Fourth is in play

Mr Pages

Pages fucking HATES the monkey.

Literally moves into your house, drinks all your wine and calls you a bitch.

Really likes Roquefort Cheese. This is important Lore.

Inquire after Mr Pages' own heart's desire: Normally, it would be unwilling to divulge information of a personal nature. But under the influence of uncanny musics, the Masters sometimes let something slip.

Mr Pages, in your drawing room, waltzes clumsily to the aerological sympthony. You watch, carefully, as it performs some soaring dance of heavens long since abandoned. Beneath its robes, shapes stir and bulge, as if trying to break through the cloth. Are those wings?

"Home," it says, it's voice slurred, "I want to see the stars again."

Mr Pages' approach is brutally successful, and First City coins teeter in stacks at its elbow. It raises aggressively, pushing rivals into situations where they stake more than they should. Then it folds, leaving others locked in bidding wars they daren't lose. Then, when it has a strong hand, Pages pursues it relentlessly, driving up the pot and turning routs into slaughters. Its victories are infrequent, but Pages only cares about comparative success. All it cares about is staying one coin ahead.

Beats the Monkey but offers him a Chance if he has something to bet. The Monkey bets you. Pages instantly accepts. And loses to the monkey.

Now hang on a minute— you protest, but Pages raises a talon. "Quiet please! It is inapproprisiderate for the stake to speak. The Chance has been offered and accepted. One more round; all or nothing."

Cards are drawn, discarded, drawn again. The Monkey does not stand on ceremony now; there is no showmanship. It calmly puts down a straightforward Ascension of Cats: the three, four, five, six, seven, eight and nine. Pages stares. It contorts beneath its robes. "I offer a Chance of my own!" it screeches, in panic. The Monkey shakes its head, but Pages persists. "Name a price! A flask of Hesperidean Cider! A vial of my own blood! The very robe from my back!"

The Monkey hesitates. It is obviously tempted. To disrobe a Master, to expose its true nature here, before Londoners... But no. The Monkey keeps its eyes on the prize. It picks its nose, dismissively. Thwarted, Pages emits a strangled noise, and jerks spasmodically to its feet. "Impuderagous!" it squeaks, and hurls its cards across the room before sweeping from the Helmsman.

Publishes a bunch of poems about how much monkeys suck.

Confirmed crime is Truth-Strangling.

The Manager

Ask about the Manager's heart's desire: The Manager offers a hungry phantom of a smile. "Cities are odd beasts, don't you find? One can never tell where one begins."

"My needs are simplicity itself. I want a bright diamond. I will make it my heart and grow from there into something strange and wild. Like my beloved. I will carry the seed of a new city. Perhaps I could be of sandstone and gold. That would look very splendid, don't you think?"

The Manager's style is infuriatingly languid. He considers his hand minutely before every bid. When he raises, he counts his coins with plodding deliberation before committing them. And then, half the time, he reveals he has nothing better than a Remorse of Sisters or a Roser's Retreat! Except, apparently, when someone thinks they have him figured out and calls his bluff, only to walk right into a Peace of Hell or an Black Glass Mirror. The Manager likes to keep his opponents guessing.

Uses Nightmares against his opponents.

You can choose to win one of his Brass Buttons or the Topsy King’s Mind when you beat him.

A Bright Brass Button: You won it from the Manager of Royal Beth during a game of the Marvellous. It is a key to a secret back door allowing you to leave his hotel. And it is very, very shiny. [Weapon; Watchful +3, Bizarre +2, Glasswork +1]

Your Monkey

The Monkey appears to be asleep, but you are certain it is a ruse. You think it's trying to put the other players off their game. It snores loudly when Virginia is deciding whether to raise. It chatters its teeth as the Bishop rearranges his cards, upsetting his train of thought. And whenever Mr Pages lays down a card, the Monkey noisily breaks wind.

The Monkey is guilty against Hell and the Chain (only ascension is permitted)

The Monkey used to be Gregory Beechwood, and previously won the Marvelous. His desire had been to become an ape because he believed aps were better than humans. He now regrets it. A lot.

His current Heart’s Desire is to end the Marvelous forever.

Beechwood's argument was that man once existed in a state of grace: its present form a devolution. That pristine state was to be found in the form of the ape. One of the players of the Marvellous just so happens to be a monkey – your Monkey, to be precise.

The Monkey gives you a wink, then darts a glance at Pages' now useless mountain of remaining coins. Was that the play? To tempt Pages into giving up his stake advantage? To even the odds by risking everything on a single hand? With you as the prize? Well, it could have bl__dy asked!

Wins against Pages, but not before hesitating when Pages offers its own robes for a Chance of its own.

Your final opponent is your own monkey.

Virginia

She is very, very mad at you.

Ask about Virginia's own heart's desire: An old desire, renewed. Virginia gives you the thinnest smile you have ever seen. "Sanctuary," she says, in a voice as soft as bare feet on snow. She looks away, indicating the end of the discussion.

Virginia sets a strategy early and holds to it come hell or high water. She trusts to the deck, discarding reliable cards in the hope of a high-scoring combination. But the cards aren't her friend tonight. The best she can manage is a Brace of Hats, then a String of Rats. But every now and again, it pays off. When it looks like she's within inches of constructing a Great Chain, Mr Pages folds hurriedly. A few rounds later a six-card Mirrorcatch wins back her losses. If her fortunes change, her approach might bear fruit.

Loses to your Monkey.

Kills you so you can meet the Boatman. Is like really excited to do it. "I've been waiting for this...." Virginia arrives at your lodgings promptly. She passes a cursory glance over the instruments of death you've neatly laid out for her (to furnish your own demise.) "Thank you, my dear," she says, "But I shan't be needing those." She advances on you, wearing her sharpest smile. Mercifully, you do not remember the rest.

The Bishop

Ask about the Bishop's own heart's desire: The Bishop smiles, though he is no longer looking at you, instead off into some middle distance. "South," he says at last, his voice low as though thickened with honeyed wine. "To be forgiven. To be welcomed. To end all these darkened days of wandering. To taste sweet fruit upon my tongue and walk in pastures gold. I would lie down upon that splendid glade like cloth of emerald and feel my cares mist away, like dew on a cold morning. And I would not walk there alone. I would open the gates, and lay a path so that others could follow, those who knew the signs." Thin tears streak his face.

The Bishop's style is cautious. He prefers reliable hands, and rarely raises. He watches his pile of coins hawkishly, as though they might abandon the table of their own volition. Still, after a few rounds you think you have discerned a pattern: every three or four rounds he finds his courage, and plays to the end regardless of his hand.

Loses to you or the Manager depending on how you faired in the Honor.

Topsy King

Doesn’t seem to remember why he plays. Staked his mind against the Manager to stay in the game and lost. The Manager now keeps his mind.

He favours esoteric combinations and rare exceptions. He invokes the Treachery of Sevens, the Heart-Catcher's Promise, and the Embarrassment of Swans. He constructs elaborate Conspiracies from low-numbered cards, and disposes of kings and queens like a guillotine. He is having a good night, winning a steady trickle of coins from the other players. But his weak point is the Manager, who always seems to know what the Topsy King is holding.

Loses to you or the Manager depending on how you faired in the Honor.

You have won back the Topsy King's mind. You should return it to him. Even if it is sometimes a lizard.

You restored it to him. He will never be as he was, but nor is he entirely what he became. Some of the time he is the Topsy King; sometimes he is Tristram

The Thief-Oath of Tristram Bagley: You restored some of his lost mind, and the Topsy King will forever be in your debt. He will always owe you a favour, and you will always have a friend in a high place. [Affiliation; Shadowy +1, Dreaded +1, Bizarre +1, Mithridacy +1, Visiting Tristram Bagley +1]

October

Previous Winner.

The Calendar Council is composed of twelve members: each opposes the purview of one of the Masters.

"October achieved her goal and vacated the Council. But she remains one of twelve – a successor has not been chosen. She must mean to, however, so we must assume she is somewhere that the Masters cannot reach but the Council can. Which suggests – ah. Yesterday's Clerestory."

"I asked for my dreams to come true, and the Masters arranged certain accommodations with the powers of the Is-Not."

"The Masters didn't know who I really was, of course. I spent years constructing a false identity in order to join the Marvellous. Virginia saw through it, but did not expose me. Not that I'd have let her." October smiles bright as a falling star. "Afterwards, I used my reward to cast one of the Masters in a prison of its own failures." October sighs wistfully, "I understand that most of them have had second thoughts about the game since then."

Won and killed Mirrors.

The Boatman

A previous Winner

At last, he answers in his creaking voice. "A replacement. I grow weary." His voice echoes in the hollowness of his skull. "My desire was granted, but difficult to arrange. An appropriate substitute did not exist; therefore one had to be born." The Boatman punts the craft further into the centre of the river.

"They should be of age now. And yet." The Boatman's gaze is briefly reflected in the water, dark empty sockets lost in the darkness. "Perhaps there has been a complication." His voice cracks, a splinter of melancholic menace.

His Amused Lordship

A previous Winner.

His Lordship tells you of his heart's desire. "Damn fool game. I only played to rescue a damn fool friend. Well, friend undersells it rather a lot. She wouldn't be pleased to hear me describe her so. They have such terrible foul language on Mutton Island." His Lordship smiles wistfully. "She was on a dark path, a seeker of that which shouldn't be sought. I played the game to win her back."

Won and freed Mrs Plenty from Seeking.

Mr Hearts

Created the Marvelous in the Third City because the Masters were bored. Lord of Blood in the Third City

Is fat!!! Bulky!! Big!!

Flies you to the top of the tower!!

Has red eyes.

Final Match

Takes place deep in the Bazaar. Literally in the Bazaar’s heart.

The Masters all gather and hang from the ceiling to watch.

Visions of different outcomes assault both of you with the beat of the heart.

Visions of Power: You feel the slow stretching in your bones. Your organs, persistently rearranging themselves into superior configurations. You cast off your robes to stretch your new arched wings, wide enough to break the sky.

The Bazaar opens all of its seven doors to you: the other Masters welcome you to a spire of your own. In the innermost chambers, you let fall your robe and allow your magnificent wings to spread—

Visions of Love: Adoring eyes locked with yours. The heat of a fierce embrace, beating heart to beating heart. Two lives, completed by each other. A love that inspires and consumes.

You play with a poet's ardour and mastery of form. The cards want you to win; they adore you. A rare Adoration of Days; a timely Anchorite of Norwich. Your opponent, meanwhile, is struck by these visions more powerfully than those of yesterday. Tears glisten on his hairy cheeks. His paws shake. He still plays a string of lucky, desperate hands, but you're able to win back some of your coins before the day is through.

Visions of Time: You see yourself defying time (the greatest of thieves), and living hale and healthy into a new age of the world. An endless future, to make of which what you want. And not just time for you, but for others, too. The theft of the sixth city deferred. London's lifespan is prolonged, gleaming like the Neath's darkest jewel.

The heart shows you a New Empire, its dawn-ships conquering territories across the zee. It shows you the Sixth City – a colony of the Fifth – suspended in chains from the Neath's ceiling. You see yourself, centuries hence, on a throne of roses in the Eighth City after the Treachery of Arbor; and then you leading the leagues of Hell against the Ninth— In each vision, you dedicate a handful of years to planning your next move in the Marvellous.

Visions of Escape: Escape from London, escape from the Neath. You see the glow of a rising sun across the length of a horizon; feel the playful touch of wind in your hair; smell the scent of fresh-fallen snow, sharp and crisp; hear the relentless chatter of birds, clear in a blue sky.

You lose, but invoke your Chance, staking something. Either your profession, your destiny or a single penny. (if you don't have a penny you can borrow one from Hearts.)

You win, then. But Beechwood, your monkey, wishes to stake his own Chance.

Accept his Chance: He stakes all that is left of himself. The remainder of his humanity. And then places a losing hand on purpose. He turns feral and runs off, unable to deal with being trapped in the game as a monkey any longer.

Decline his Chance: Beechwood has drawn away. You can see him wringing his paws together, compulsively. His eyes are haunted. He knows that – in a few years' time, when the false-stars align – he must play the Marvellous again.

Your Desire

Mr Hearts speech: "Colleagues, we are gathered (save for Mr Pages, who is excluded for reasons of a conflict of interest) to fulfil our sacred duty. This creature–" here, it gestures at you, "–has proven victorious in the Marvellous and earned their heart's desire!"

There is polite, scattered applause.

You take the time to look around. The walls are adorned with calendars – some of them follow earthly dating systems, others do not – and maps. The workbenches are covered with indecipherable apparatus. A set of heavy red books stands on a shelf. You can make out the black-lettered title of the nearest: 'The Tragedy Procedures Vol. VII.'

"Here," Mr Hearts tells you, "is where we perform our greatest works. This is where we ascertained how to purchase London, and how to accomplish the small request Her Majesty required in exchange. Thus far, no request has been beyond us. Now, if you would do us the honour, tell us your heart's desire. We shall do all in our power to grant it."

Power: You want to be one of them, a Master of the Bazaar – terrible, glorious, magnificent.

Another argument follows, this one not about whether but about how. There is some debate as to your bailiwick and whether this can be a purely titular bestowal. It cannot. Spices and Hearts begin to mix steaming concoctions at one of the workbenches. Mr Veils measures you for a robe.

In the end, Hearts approaches you. "It is decided. You will be Mr Cards."

Love: There is a long silence. "The problem, oh perspicacious, indeed brilliant, victor of our game," Spices says in its sibilant whisper, "is that despite our very best efforts – and I do not wish to disparage our dear Mr Fires in saying this – we cannot manufacture love." Fires only grunts.

"Does it have to be true love?" Wines interjects, thoughtfully. "There are approximations that, as far as we can tell, are indistinguishable in all meaningful ways—"

"We are not all convinced," Hearts cuts in, "That true love even exists. Certainly, we have yet to isolate it. But! Happily, we can offer something better: adoration. Celebration! The whole city, united in recognition of your evident magnificence. Fame, and of course, glory."

Choose something else. Choose something that is not love.

The Masters have no idea what love really is.

Adoration: To be known by all. To be admired. To be worshipped! In every mind of the city will live a shining image of you, perfect, pristine, and permanent. A collective sigh of relief from the Masters. Adulation, adoration, envy – all these can be readily manufactured.

Time: Long life – not just for you, but London, too. Eventually, the Masters will require a Sixth City. But London is your home, and you would want to defer that day as long as possible.

"This means London, in its entirety, is technically yours. We shall not," it says, raising a claw to the other Masters, "seek the Sixth until all reasonable hope for the Fifth is lost. These are our terms: this your prize."

How long have you bought for the city? Years? Decades? Centuries? More than it had, certainly. You look around at its familiar, grimy streets; the poignant, flickering glow of its gaslamps; the people hurrying by to jobs and appointments, oblivious to the fact that you have saved them from a fate that has befallen four other cities. Perhaps London itself is your heart's desire. And a reckoning has been postponed.

Escape: You want to walk on the Surface again. You want nothing less than the sun, the sea, and the stars – the real stars!

Eventually, between them, they reach a proposal. Mr Hearts presents it to you. "There are certain laws that are, unfortunately, beyond us. The capriciousness of sunlight is one. Were you to return to the Surface there is every chance the sunlight might kill you, and there is nothing we could do to prevent it. However, there are places where the sun is only an occasional visitor."

Mr Fires unrolls a map of the Surface, and stabs a claw into the top of it. "We will build you a home. Here. The sun is absent there nearly half a year at a time. The location looks to be somewhere in the arctic circle. Habitable, but hardly clement.

Your Defeat

Yes, you can let the monkey win.

The Marvellous is over. In fact, if Beechwood is true to his word, it is over forever.

The Monkey asks you to come with him to get his reward.

A pair of Masters carries you and the Monkey – Hearts for him and Iron for you. Membranous wings rip through their robes, and with a beat you are lifted aloft, borne to the highest chamber in the Bazaar.

You tell them the Monkey’s desire is to end the Marvelous for good. Hearts is very upset but Stones argues that after the ‘Mirrors Incident’ it should have been ended.

"It would be a shame," purrs Spices. "The Marvellous has been terribly diverting, and the days are so very long." Sympathetic murmurs from the other Masters.

"Enough, Our truest currency, colleagues, is our word." Mr Wines is speaking, now. "This is entirely in the rules as you established them, Mr Hearts. It's hardly the monkey's fault."

"I must strongly object!" splutters Hearts.

'NOTED.' reads another note from Mr Iron. 'AND IGNORED.'

Item Rewards

Marvellous Monkey: A monkey, once called Gregory Beechwood, who achieved his heart's desire, regretted it, and (with your aid) brought about an end to the Masters' preferred entertainment, though it cost him everything. [Companion; Watchful +5, Persuasive +5, A Player of Chess +1, Dangerous -1]

The Robe of Mr Cards: The robe is huge and concealing, and glistens like wormskin. It contains an ingenious framework, which grants its wearer the profile and stature of a Master of the Bazaar. 'Mr Cards,' of course, is you. Every month you call at the Ormolu Door of the Bazaar, and are taken inside to undergo various painful but improving procedures. Already you have grown a few inches, though your posture suffers. Your ears are lengthening. And one day – one bold, magnificent day – those nubs on your shoulder blades will be wings. [Clothes; Persuasive +11, Dreaded +2, Artisan of the Red Science +1]

Newly-Cast Crown of the City of London: Fresh-forged from authentic starlight (carried from the High Wilderness in the Bazaar's vaults) this magnificent crown denotes your position as Regent of London. It heavily implies that you are in the line of succession, and gleams like the promise of power. It has been made to your exact size, for it will only ever adorn your head. The Masters have promised you that. [Hat; Persuasive +13, Respectable +2, Mithridacy +1]

A Leasehold on All of London: This is the very contract by which Her Majesty agreed to sell London to the Masters. It is a labyrinth of legal complexity and metaphysical demarcation – partly written in English, partly in Latin, and partly in the Correspondence. As a result, it is best stored in a fireproof steel tube. The text has been meticulously amended in order to extend the 'guaranteed period' in which 'it is prohibited for the previously-specified parties to arrange the replacement, abdication, or discontinuation of London' in favour of 'any other metropolis of comparable significance and succulence.' The exact duration of the extension is not specified: as with all the best legal precedent, it makes much hay of the word 'reasonable' – 'for a reasonable period,' 'to a reasonable observer,' and so on. No doubt some lucky court will be expected to work out the details at a future point. A final, recent clause specifies that the owner of this leasehold (that's you) is entitled to a monthly stipend of revivifying peach brandy to 'further and ensure that party's longevity and rude health.' [Home Comfort; Shadowy +10, Respectable +2, A Player of Chess +1]

A Palatial Holiday Home in the Arctic Circle: A Surface mansion of your own, dappled in genuine moonlight. It enjoys commanding views of dense pine forests, and basks in the infinite hues of the Aurora Borealis. The mansion is only accessible via a secret funicular connecting to the Travertine Spiral. When the sun is absent, for several months of the year, you can travel there and breathe fresh air, and hear birds, and walk in real, new-fallen snow. [Home Comfort; Watchful +10, Bizarre +2, Mithridacy +1]

The Marvellous: This deck – consecrated at the Root of Need – was used in the ancient and treacherous game known as the Marvellous. Player after player was broken upon it. But since you forsook your heart's desire, proving you were not subject to your own wants, the cards have been obedient. Now, they anticipate your needs, and seem eager to please. When you play with them it's as if they're speaking to you. Via their oblique language of numbers, faces and combinations, they hint of broader, grander games played behind the skin of the world. [Weapon; Persuasive +13, Bizarre +2, A Player of Chess +1]

#fallen london #mr pages #mr hearts #mr stones #hearts desire spoilers #lore #long post

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tempo-takoyaki · 5 years ago

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Hi, do you think you have any TPN fanfic you'd recommend? I don't mind any ships or gen fics. I'm just trying to find interesting/good fanfics to read but I couldn't find any fic recs yet in this fandom. I like your fics, so I just thought I might like your recommendations. By the way, thank you for writing the Can You Hear the Sea fic and Giver fic (those two are my favorites!)

Wow thanks ! (^^)/ I’m honoured to be trusted enough to give fic recommandations ! I mostly choose my authors currently, so I will do something similar here.

@piperemerald : (Piper_Emerald on Ao3), Mostly Norray. One of my favorite authors in the fandom! She planifies everything in her fics, which means you are guaranteed to have a good and smooth reading, I once got so caught up in one of her works that I missed my subway station. Incredible writing, but most importantly very good characterization, all her characters feel human and real (which is something I appreciate a lot). I would love to just recommend all of her fics right on the stop but it would be too long, so I’ll simply select a few ones.

Falling For Your Voice (Norman/Ray, rated M, Emma/Violet and Yuugo/Lucas as backgrounds ships) : Modern Life AU where Norman is a renowned singer and Ray a famous but anonymous writer, the both falling in love with each other through the words in their works. What I said about the author is still the same, incredible writing style, amazing characterization, at the same time funyt, tender, and kind of heartbreaking too. It was the first fic I read from her and I have no regrets. 11 chapters of pure bliss. I want to also precise that, while rated M, there’s no explicit sex scenes despite having mentions of it. And all characters are aged-up of course.

An Hour To Midnight (Norman/Ray, rated T) : Coffee Shop AU. I... Don't really have nothing more to say to describe the work. I want to spoil as less as possible because there’s a ton of little details that I love in this one-shot. It’s a coffee shop au, but a really good one. One of my favorite work by the author. If I only have to say one thing to recommend it: Ray is dislexic and I live for that.

Now, I will stop there for Piper_Emerald, but I could also recommend Language Barrier and Pomegrenate Seed as well as Cursed and In The Next Mile too. All Norray. And all amazings. But this time I prefer to let you check by yourself.

Now then , to our next author: @justanotherbnhalover (hi) (7FlyingPancakes7 on Ao3), like previously, mostly Norray. No, I don’t have a bias because we get along, I sincerely love her fics a lot. It depends on the fic more this time, but I particularly adores the AUs she makes and the universes she creates around it, they are not just good fics, but good stories too. Her writing style is amazing, able to capture every little thought of her characters like she is putting us in their heads (not excluding intrusive thoughts too). The writing style is what captivates me a lot too, she just creates sentences that makes you shiver.

To Die For (Norman/Ray, rated M for… explicit reasons) : What can you do when a serial killer falls in love with you? THIS FIC. THIS FIC. I have a personal history with fanfics depicting unhealthy relationships, and THIS FIC is awesome. Not only its a clear example of how far the author can go with writing intrusive thoughts, but also a great thriller. Will Ray discover that Norman is the killer? Or will Norman manage to fool the person he loves for his whole life? WHO KNOWS. The fic isn’t finished yet, but I would recommend you to read it anyway.

This Song Is For You (Norman/Ray, rated T) : Mermaid AU where Mermaid Norman gets charmed by Ray’s singing. A very interesting take on a Mermaid AU ! But it’s not just the context, the story itself is good. Unlike other fics, it’s not as mystery centered as others, but the Mermaid universe is enough to get completely into it. Not only that, but again, a very good writing, and as funny as always too... I love Mermaid stories so be prepared yourself to be given more.

Now, I could’ve recommended other fics, but TSIFY is the only finished Mermaid fic (hence why I recommended it) and I wanted to propose something else besides Smile (While You Can), though I still recommend it too.

Another author (and finally not Norray, at least I’ll choose some that are not Norray) @amaikana ! (hi) (amaitori on Ao3 for non explicit works). Very productive author ! ... Does not finish their multi-chapters fic a lot though. (Think of them as this book entirely made of first chapters). But every single one-shots are a ray of light in the darkness (mostly because some of them are very funny). Is mostly focused on slice of life short stories, so it’s also nice to take a break from all those angsty fics! I would categorize her as the “feel good” author. There’s some angsty stuff, but the majority of the works are mostly fluff.

Blue Eyes (Gen, rated G, some Rayemma on te side but nothing more) : Cute stories about Ray and his new adopted brother Norman. A serie of cute one-shots with Norman being 6 years old and Ray 10. Like I said, very good to feel good, it’s adorable, it’s funny, and it’s about kids.

Chance Among the Stars (Norman/Emma, rated T, Ray and Norman are biological brothers) Fate/Stay Night Heaven’s Feel AU. It’s more than just because I am a Fate fan, but this fic is genuinely one of her best works. It’s filled with emotions and magical lores and it’s cool as hell. Also, I like angst.

And that’s it because those are mostly really short one-shots or series of one-shots so... it’s better to see for yourself ! :D (Also lots of OT3 to my joy).

Now, we will go into the territory of fics that I read without checking the author’s other works a lot. It’s not that I dislike the author’s other works, let’s just stay I mostly remember the fic (and only started to do it by author recently too).

I got a ticket to another world (Norman/Ray, rated T, written by heismysoulmate) : Norman adopts a very strange cat. A cool fantastic one-shot and a cool short story overall. The characters are interesting, and the relationship development is good.

pushing youth to the limits (Norman/Emma/Ray, not rated but definitely M, written by sugacookies_with_tae) : A cleptomaniac, a murderess and a depressive on a road trip. It’s what I’ll say to summarize the plot, because if you’re like me, you’ll think “wow, it’s either really good or really bad, I’m going to read it”. Spoiler: it’s good, it’s good in the type “who cares?”. I don’t know how to describe it, it’s just a bunch of fucked up kids trying to live and it’s somehow interesting? Wow. (Also, if its plot comes from a K-pop music video. I watched it, and uh... actually don’ t. It’s not that the music is bad or the clip is bad, it’s just that you might try to compare it to the fic, and I honestly prefer to just enjoy the story.)

love me like you do (Ray/Emma, rated T, written by isshun) : Actors AU. I don’t know what else I have to say to describe it, it’s just good. The author alternates between the actors living their life and what people say on the internet with very realistic tweets. It’s super cute and very nice, and slow-burn too. A very good one-shot overall.

Deep Blue (Norman/Ray (YES AGAIN), rated T, written by NanamiChiLovesYou) : Mermaid AU, Little Mermaid AU, Ray, a mermaid, transforms himself into a human in order to find a way to protect his family who still lives under the sea. This fic has awaken a lot of us to Mermaids, and for good reasons. It’s very good. The whole transformation thing is perfectly executed, all characters are intersting... And it’s unifinshed (*goes sobbing in a corner*). But it doesn’t matter, because it’s just awesome ! Unlike with TSIFY, the universe is less developed in order to focus more on the characters and their interactions, which definitely gives another vibe.

Here are all my recommandations ! (^^)/ I hope you will find your happiness in all of those ! (There’s a ton of others but I can’t remember, I also avoided talking about smut here, but if you want smut fic recommandations you can ask me)

There’s a reason why there’s so many Norray fics despite me not particularly being a big Norray shipper but I won’t write them down here, if you are curious, don’t hesitate to ask me about why those specific preferences.

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sage-nebula · 4 years ago

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Game Review — Story of Seasons: Pioneers of Olive Town

In the past, I was never really one for farming sims. In fact, I used to pass on every single Harvest Moon game because the idea of farming just didn’t seem fun to me. Then I heard you could have same-sex romance options in Stardew Valley, so I played that, fell in love, and thus got very excited for the newest Story of Seasons game, since I knew that Story of Seasons was Harvest Moon previously, and Harvest Moon inspired Stardew Valley.

And all I have to say is . . .

Overall Score: 5.5/10

. . . oh boy.

Well, I actually have a lot more to say than just that, but that should give you a general idea of what the rest of this review is going to be like. I do want to say up front that I have played through the entire first in-game year to give the game a fair shake, so please trust me when I say I did my due diligence to give this game a real chance before I reviewed it. If you’re ready, jump under the cut (best read on my blog for formatting reasons) and let’s get into it.

The Pros:

The character customization, while not perfect, is definitely several leaps in the right direction. None of the clothing or hairstyle options are gender locked, which is amazing. There is a variety of skin tones to choose from. You pick your pronouns independently of everything else, voice included, so you can 100% have a trans character if you want to (or a nonbinary character if you don’t mind using gendered pronouns for your nonbinary character). I do wish the clothing selection was better (especially at the start, when you only have two outfits to choose from) and having different body types would be cool as well, but the fact that you have so much freedom with regards to gender presentation is a definite plus.

Likewise, being able to have same-sex relationships is a huge plus as well. Honestly, it was what convinced me to pick up the game; I might not have gotten it if it didn’t have that option in there, but that pushed me over the edge. I mean, the fact that it’s 2021 means this sort of thing should be expected, but with Japanese games on Nintendo systems it’s really not always guaranteed, so the fact that it was included still does deserve to get a mention as a plus.

It’s easy to raise affection with the villagers by just talking to them, which is an improvement over Stardew where you pretty much had to give gifts to raise affection (because I don’t think talking did it, or if it did, it was abysmally slow). I was able to unlock heart events pretty quickly just by running around the town and talking quickly with the villagers each day, which is particularly nice since the preferred gifts can be pretty expensive at first.

I enjoy that not all of the heart events necessarily involve the farmer, especially for characters that aren’t romanceable. It’s nice to see the villagers interacting with each other more, to see that they have lives and relationships outside of the farmer’s sphere of influence. It also gives you unique insight into the characters, because how they act around or with each other isn’t always how they interact around or with the farmer.

Being able to sow seeds in multiple patches of dirt at once is nice, especially since otherwise it takes much longer than it does in, say, Stardew. I mean, in Stardew you can hold the A button and sow everything at once, whereas in Olive Town you have to do it one press at a time. So to be able to do a multi-plant is very nice.

The pet and mount selection is pretty great, too. I love how many different types of breeds of dog there are, how many different cats and different types of horses, and of course the unique mounts like the unicorn or the wolf.

The farm has a lot of space once you unlock the different areas, and is divided into neat sections to make organizing easier.

Having not played a Story of Seasons game before this one, and knowing that Stardew Valley’s developer was inspired by Harvest Moon, I can’t say entirely which features were unique to Stardew and borrowed and which ones Stardew borrowed first. However, I have seen others claim that the tool bar at the bottom of the screen (which is nearly identical to the one in Stardew) was unique to Stardew, so I can say that this is one area in which they copped something from Stardew and did it well. The fact that you can put your tools into a separate tool bag to make some emergency room in your bag is nice too.

The Neutrals:

While there are a lot of villagers and they all have their own heart events and interactions, the day-to-day dialogue can get very repetitive. I can’t tell you the amount of times Laura has told me about losing track of time during Laura Things, or how many times Jack has told me about how his mom told him about planting different crops and he thinks that’s just too much work. The dialogue only really seems to change around festivals / after plot changes, and it can really make characters that might otherwise feel fleshed out feel more like . . . well, NPCs. Which they are, but you don’t really want them to feel like that in a sim game. So while the characters are (mostly) unique, sometimes they can feel a bit repetitive.

The plot is a bit weird. It’s not bad, per se, but it’s weird that the plot focuses on wanting to turn the local town into a tourist hotspot. I get that the idea is that they want to bring commerce into the town (I guess), but that everyone is on board with it and the fact that it’s essentially gentrification just feels a bit . . . weird, for a game that’s supposed to focus more on nature. The tasks associated with it also get very repetitive, and that’s not even talking about how you literally have to improve the roads and lamps twice to make a difference.

The holiday festivals are also pretty average. It’s either a cutscene, or a tiny minigame (or sometimes not even a minigame, but I’ll get to that). The minigames are charming, but they’re not something that I’d want to do the following year. You’ve done it once, you’ve done it a million times. It’s also strange that there’s not a festival to celebrate your farm at all, whereas at least in Stardew we had the Stardew Valley Fair and I hear that in past Harvest Moon / Story of Seasons games they had farm celebration festivals, too. It’s just a bit strange.

The music is hit or miss, and mostly miss if I’m being honest, but I’ll still put it here. The songs are too short; they loop far too fast, and often sound no better than you’d expect a game on the GBA to sound (especially that first cave theme, ugh). There are some nice melodies, but again, when I compare it to Stardew (which I know isn’t exactly fair, but also Stardew is made by a grand total of one person when this game had an entire team so I feel it’s at least a little fair), it’s a pretty big letdown in the music department.

The bachelorettes are not very unique. Like, they are different, you can tell them apart, but . . . the primary difference between Bridgette and Linh, for instance, is that Linh is Korean (and also looks like a child which I don’t like at all if we’re being honest) while Bridgette is white. Otherwise they’re both sweet and shy and have basically the same personality. Reina and Blaire are also pretty similar, in that they’re both outgoing party types. The main difference between them besides their hair color (brunette and blonde respectively) is the fact that one works at the museum while the other is a waitress. The only one who really stands out is Laura, and while Laura is great (and the one I chose to marry), it’s still disappointing when you see how varied the bachelors are. It feels like not a lot of effort was put into designing the bachelorettes, which is sad when you consider they’re kind of major characters since they’re part of the dating pool.

The Cons:

This game is AWFUL to play. How, you may ask? Well, let me count the ways:

To start with, the loading screens are atrocious. There are loading screens between everything that you do. You go to town? Loading screen. You leave town? Loading screen. Start your day? Loading screen. Go in and out of barns or coops? Loading screens. And they take ages, or at least in this day and age it feels like they take ages. Particularly when you go into town, immediately realize you forgot a resource you needed for an upgrade, and go back so you get back to back cutscenes, they’re fricking awful. I cannot believe that loading screens this annoying were necessary for this game. I refuse to accept that as truth. They absolutely could have cut out the time it takes to load had they spent more time on development instead of rushing this title out for the anniversary, and speaking of things they could have ironed out in development . . .

THE LAG. THE FREEZING. THE CRASHING. THE POP-IN DISTANCING. If I didn’t know that an entire development team worked on this game, I wouldn’t believe it. This game is, put simply, a mess. Even when my farm was brand new and had pretty much nothing on it, I was noticing framerate drops both in docked and handheld mode. I’m talking, I had maybe one coop and two planted areas for crops, and the framerate was noticeably dropping. And now that I do have more stuff on my farm? Not only is the lag atrocious, but the game can’t load everything on the screen at once and so things have to pop into view after a few seconds. You can see video footage of this here, which also features one of the delightful loading screens. And this doesn’t even get into how the game will randomly freeze, or how I’ve had it crash once already. And from what I hear, I’m not unique in this. The fact they had the nerve to release this game as finished when it performs like this just boggles the mind.

Despite the fact that the Switch has two control sticks, this game plays only with one. This means that you can’t, you know, aim your tools with anything but the main control stick. And when you’re both controlling your character and aiming with the same control stick, the latter gets pretty hard. This leads to me missing things with my axe or hammer even when they’re right in front of me, as well as taking a lot of damage from the cave enemies simply because I couldn’t get in the sweet spot to both hit them with the hammer and also not get hit myself, particularly before they escape. It adds a lot of unnecessary frustration because the controls are so flawed and imprecise.

Similarly, there is a sweet spot when it comes to harvesting or picking up items off the ground, and it’s impossible to determine what that sweet spot is because you don’t get a little aiming box for that. So you can be right on top of an item and unable to pick it up because you’re not in that sweet spot.

Apart from the framerate drops, there is input lag as well. This is most noticeable when swinging axes or hammers, or trying to pet cows and other animals after milking them. And yes, I know it’s the game and not my Switch, because it’s not consistent (and also doesn’t happen with other games). Again, this is something polish and more time in the oven probably could have handled, but now it’s too late and just makes the game frustrating to play.

Technical, mechanical gameplay issues aside, though, there are still a ton of other issues. For instance: makers. Again, I can’t say if previous Harvest Moon / Story of Seasons games had these, or if they were invented by Stardew and copped by this dev team, but what I can say is that while makers also exist in Stardew, they are handled way better there than the absolute nightmare they are here. Again, to count the ways:

In Stardew, the makers can sit flush against each other and buildings, as well as flush against paths, making everything nice and not taking up too much space. Here, not only are the makers gigantic, but they can’t be flush with anything. They can’t sit up against each other, against buildings, or against paths. This means that not only do they look ugly, but they also take up a tremendous amount of space that therefore can’t go toward anything else.

In Stardew there are a handful of makers that do things. You’ve got furnaces for making bars, mayonnaise makers, cheese makers, fabric spinners, etc. There’s a variety, but it’s not so much that your farm becomes nothing but makers. By contrast, Olive Town is drowning in makers. You have all the above, but also more that contribute to those because . . . okay, let’s take the fabric spinners for example. In Stardew, you can put any type of wool onto the fabric spinning wheel, which will make one kind of fabric. In Olive Town, you first have to have a thread maker to make thread out of grass, AS WELL AS a yarn maker to make yarn out of wool. THEN you have to have a thread fabric maker to make fabric out of thread (and the thread differs depending on the grass used, which means you can make many different types of fabrics, but only one at a time), AS WELL AS a yarn fabric maker to make fabric out of yarn. So whereas in Stardew you have one maker if you need cloth, in Olive Town you need at bare minimum two, at max four, and that’s not even getting into how slow the process will be if you only have one of each kind. Because each maker only makes one of an item, and then you usually need multiples of that one item to make the next item in the series. So for instance, your thread maker makes one spool of thread, but it takes THREE spools to make one piece of fabric. Then you might need TEN pieces of fabric for a recipe. And the makers all take literal in-game hours to make. When you consider that the costs for some things are very high (the house upgrade I’m on right now requires 80 ingots and 120 pieces of lumber), you pretty much have to have at least four of each type of maker to get things done at any kind of reasonable pace, hence the factory hell my farm is currently in as seen in the above linked video. It’s a fucking nightmare. And yes, maybe it’s more realistic that you can’t go immediately from wool to fabric, but this is a farming sim where you interact with spirits, ride unicorns, and befriend wolves. This is not a game where you need to push realism.

The mining is also just . . . not fun. At all. Not only do you have the “it’s really hard to aim properly, especially when you’re trying not to take damage” issue mentioned above, but there’s also the fact that there’s just no variation. In the first mine there are no enemies at all, you’re just breaking rocks. The second mine introduces enemies, but only one type of enemy (basically little moles that you have to whack with the hammer). The third mine has the same enemies, but they’re stronger and appear in multiples. And that’s it. Unlike in Stardew, where there were tons of different monsters that did different things that made the mines exciting, here it’s pretty boring because the enemies are easy to avoid (and it’s best to avoid them because of how much of a pain in the ass to hit them without taking damage from running into them is) and the levels all pretty much look the same. Whereas I loved dungeon crawling in Stardew, here it’s something I purely do to get ore to make ingots in the stupid fucking makers because there’s literally no entertainment value to it otherwise, especially since the music is subpar at best.

Related to the mining, when you defeat enemies or drain lakes you can find bags of items that need to be identified at the museum. You can only have Reina identify these bags one at a time. So it’s a bunch of spamming the A button and hearing her go “oh!” over and over and over again because they, for some reason, couldn’t implement identifying items more than one at a time. And the best part? Identifying items comes with a LOADING SCREEN between you selecting the item to be identified and Reina identifying the item! How fun!!

You can really tell that they cut corners in this game, content-wise. For instance, the first festival in spring is an egg hunt. You would think that it would be a minigame where you look for eggs (again, like Stardew). You would think that, but you would be wrong. Instead, you get to watch an extended cutscene of your character finding eggs. That’s it. That’s the “egg hunt.” I skipped the mushroom hunt in fall because I assumed it would be the same, but apparently that one actually was a minigame, so joke’s on me, I guess. But either way, the fact that the egg hunt wasn’t an egg hunt at all speaks to cut corners and rushed dev time, just like the myriad of other problems that plague this game. It’s pretty bad when you can’t even include an egg hunting minigame for whatever reason (or at leas come up with unique events for spring and fall).

There is a ton of furniture with which to decorate your house, which is great! Or it would be, if you were actually given freedom to decorate, but you’re not. You can buy whatever furniture you want, but there are very specific places where you’re allowed to place it, and nowhere else. For instance, furniture and rugs can only go in the little space in front of your counter in your house in the first two house upgrades (Log Cabin and Small House). This space is very small. Despite there being a GIANT ASS FLOOR with which to cover a rug, I wasn’t able to use it until I got the third house upgrade. You have a huge empty table that you’re not allowed to put anything on. You can’t move any of the furniture around, nor can you rotate furniture that you buy when you place it. You also can’t place furniture on rugs either. Seeing so much furniture in the game is pretty exciting until you realize that you can do basically fuck all with it. Apparently they didn’t have enough time to implement real decoration into the game either. (Then again, imagine the lag in your house if they did.) As a final complaint, you can buy picture frames that claim to let you place framed memories in your house. You have a camera as an in-game tool, so you’d think that you could place pictures of your pets or your love interest in your house. You would think that, but you would be wrong. There’s no way to change the pictures in the picture frames, or at least none that I’ve been able to find just yet.

Just like Stardew, when you first arrive at the farm in Olive Town you find that it has been completely overrun with nature, and you have to spend time clearing away the debris so that you have a place to build your farm. Unlike in Stardew, the debris comes back at a ridiculously fast rate. Several in-game hours, if not more, of each day are spent cleaning up puddles (even if it didn’t rain), breaking rocks, clearing weeds, and chopping trees. Your farm can easily become overrun with nature again in just a few days’ time, meaning that a lot of your time that you would spend doing things like scavenging the mines or talking with villagers is instead spent doing basic, boring chores around the farm so that you still have livable land. And while farming sims like this one are games that are basically built around doing chores at least in part, the extent of the damage in this one (given that it happens all day every day, instead of just at the start of each season like in Stardew) really kills any fun or enjoyment you’d otherwise have as a player.

Farm upgrades come as entirely separate buildings, rather than expanding on the current building you have. So while in Stardew you could turn your existing Barns into Big Barns (and then Deluxe Barns), in Olive Town you have to buy an entirely separate building, and then painstakingly move all your animals to the new building one by one. Similarly, you can buy a silage to upgrade from your silo, but you’ll still have the silo on the farm. It doesn’t upgrade your existing development at all, despite being an upgraded form of that existing development.

I could go on, but you get the idea. Pioneers of Olive Town has some good ideas, but ultimately the terrible gameplay and lackluster execution of those ideas leaves so, so much to be desired. I will say that a patch was released recently which improved the loading screens a little, and for that I added the .5 to the score. (I took notes on things I liked / disliked / was neutral on as I played, so that I wouldn’t forget anything.) But a slight improvement to the loading screens doesn’t do much to help it when the lag is still terrible, the game still has freezes, and overall the gameplay itself just isn’t very fun. I probably will keep playing it for a bit longer to get to the marriage scenes at least, since I’ve almost maxed out Laura’s hearts. But honestly, there are so many better life sim games out there (the oft-mentioned in this review Stardew Valley being one of them) that if someone asked me if I recommended this game to them, I would have to say no.

Let’s hope the dev team does better with the next game. Maybe not feeling the pressure of it being the series’ anniversary will take some pressure off of them while they make it.

#story of seasons: pioneers of olive town #2021 game reviews

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cosmic-affinities · 5 years ago

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Deku Vs Kacchan Part Two- Bakudeku

HOLY SHIT I just got done rewatching Deku Vs. Kacchan Part Two and now when in watching it I totally shipped the two from the start and so heres my word vomit of why I can’t understand how some people don’t see their shipping potential.

Alright so the first time I watched this episode, and their fight at Ground Beta, is where I really started to ship them hardcore, I always liked their dynamic but this really locked it in for me. So I was idly going through and rewatching some of my favorite episodes/arcs and I watched Deku Vs Kacchan Part Two, this time with them already being my favorite ship from the show so obviously I have thoughts.

I just want to go through and show why I do not understand when people absolutely refuse to think these two have any chemistry. Also this focuses on Katsuki quite a bit just because there’s usually a bunch of this type of thing about Izuku.

1) First of all back to the very begining of the series Izuku very nearly told Katsuki about OFA, he felt so guilty for betraying Katsuki that he needed a way to explain himself, with full confidence that Katsuki wouldn’t tell anyone. This was after he had spend literal months keeping all of this a secret from everyone, an everyone that included his mom and would eventually include his closest friends.

2) Back to the episode in particular, this is one of the only times we ever see Katsuki cry and get emotional (with an emotion other than anger) and it is all for Izuku. He specifically made sure Izuku and him were together and he broke down all of the walls he had put up (these same walls had kept all of his emotions from affecting him during the provisional liscence exam) Izuku is seriously the only one who can truly get how he is feeling like he says during the episode. They have such an understanding of each other’s emotions that Katsuki is actually angry that he can’t read Izuku the same way after All Might.

3) The entire episode really highlights their childhood together and Katsuki’s conflicting outward superiority complex partnered with his deep seeded inferiority complex (IMO the superiority complex he outwardly projects is the direct result of his true inferior feelings that he refuses to submit to so instead he is ‘faking it until he makes it’ so he doesn’t crumble) anyways the point of this is it really shows where all of his aggression towards Izuku comes from. He doesn’t hate Izuku necessarily he hates the fact that he is sure that Izuku looks down on him, I think if the two had met at UA or maybe even only slightly later than they did there would be much less animosity (although where’s the fun in that dynamic [im slightly kidding]) another anyways is the fact that Katsuki so willingly tells Izuku all of this and doesn’t even try to take any of it back.

4) The actual factual fight scene is also very well done and leaves a lot to my shipping imagination. The way that they know each other just well enough to know the best ways to fight but both of them have to really put everything in to even get hits out on each other shows how closely they examine the other, for Izuku we know is is out of habit/ in his nature but for Katsuki this is eye opening, showing how much he truly pays attention to, even though his demeanor is very much ‘im the best and I don’t need to learn anything about anyone’ (this is not to say that he is not very very intelligent and can very easily evaluate fighting styles on the go during battle but to say he took time outside of battle to think about Izuku says something when it comes to Katsuki) also can we all take a second to appreciate when Katsuki has Izuku pinned to the floor and they are both panting *chefs kiss*

5) When Katsuki is talking to Izuku after he has him pinned he says ‘You have All Might’s power but even using his strength even after making it your own some how you still managed to lose to me.” and normally he would stress that he lost and that he specifally lost to him but when he says it he sounds resigned and slightly dissapointed, as if he expected to lose, which is something he never expects because he does have faith in his own abilities which shows that he, no matter how subconciously, thought Izuku would win, or maybe put up more of a fight. That coming from Katsuki is high praise.

6) When Katsuki starts his rant about how he finshed All Might and breaks down he talks about how it all keeps playing on loop and that everyone has to know about it, but who does he go to? Izuku. He goes to the one person who has always been in his life and has seen him at some of his lowest moments (sludge monster) and as I mentioned before the only one who truly knows what he is feeling. Izuku even says that Katsuki was more affected than he himself was and he is All Might’s succesor.

7) Moving a bit into Izuku, this is the first time we see him stand up for himself, before this most of their interactions are negative and Izuku allows Katsuki to walk all over him, but here he tells him that he won’t be a punching bag anymore, which puts them into the playing field as equals.

8) Izuku also narrates their relationship, hitting on how awful it was up until that point, how they knew each other for a long time, how they never talked about they ‘really felt’ which can be taken with some extra shipping context since it is directly from Izuku’s point of view.

9) More about everything Izuku says, this is the first time he hears what Katsuki thinks about him, how he thinks he is constantly beeing looked down on even though Izuku treated him like he was golden. This makes everything so much clearer for the two of them, the giant mess of misunderstanding that they needed to work through, this is their opening.

10) The magnificence of the line “All Might was my hero, but you were the one actually in my life!” this is one of the lines that plenty of people say solidified the ship for them, you get to physically see how much Izuku loves All Might, mere episodes before you see his room(s) (dorm+house) covered in All Might memorbilia but he flat out says that Katsuki had/has a bigger impact on him.

11) Izuku narrates something he would never admit, he even says that he would never admit it. He says that when he gets emotional and his desire to win takes over he subconciously starts to talk like Katsuki, think about that for a second, when Izuku is aware and not swept up in a fight, he is fully trying to emulate All Might, everytime he is fighting or doing resuce mission practice he thinks about what All Might would do or say. So much so that when he gets told off for saying the wrong thing during the Provisional liscence exam he beats himself up for not doing what All Might would at the begining of the rescue mission. Even with all of that he says that when he gets rilled up he starts to talk like Katsuki, this shows how much he looks at Katsuki and sees a hero, the ideal (thats a bit of a strong word but you get the point) when he wants to win so badly he does not try to copy the actual number one hero he tries to act like Katsuki, his hero, his image of victory. Also he calls him his image of victory, come on he is basically shipping himself at that point.

12) Katsuki thinks he isn’t good enough and says so to All Might and Izuku, the one who would never willingly accept anyones help he allowed himself to tell the two of them.

13) When All Might says that Izuku admires Katsuki for his strength and Kastuki fears Izukus heart and spirit, how is that not total shipping material?!

14) This all ends with Katsuki accepting his role in Izuku’s training, he didn’t even think about it for more than a second before he ‘threatened’ Izuku basically telling him that if he doesn’t get stronger on his own Katsuki will force him to get stronger

15) Then they have their little banter about surpassing each other (mad bants ;) ) then All Might mentions that they are now ‘Proper Rivals’ in a way they werent before. Their relationship grows and expands, with that a mutual resepct and understanding.

16) When Aizawa asks who threw the first punch Katsuki does not hesitate to admit that he did, even after thier one fight he is showing growth, he doesn’t try to play it off as if it was mutual, Izuku quickly jumps in and says he was at fault as well, not letting Katsuki take all of the balme. All Might has spoken to them once and yet they’re already working better together.

17) When the two are on house arrest and Izuku asks Katsuki what he thinks about the shoot style Katsuki gives him an actual answer, and even (back handedly) compliments him on it when previously he would have shaken it off and maybe even yelled at him for asking, major improvement in their relationship.

18) This last one is something that happens in every episode but really stands out as they fight. Katsuki still lets Izuku call him Kacchan, his childhood nickname. It would be so easy and probably more ‘in character’ for him to tell Izuku off for calling him something that would be considered so childish, but I think it is his own way of holding onto that part of himself, when they were young and quirks didn’t matter. Most of the conjecture about why he lets Izuku call him that is mostly fanon but it is definetly something that helps the ship.

OK so i rambled on for a lot longer than i originally intended but here you go to the one person who might read this far, this is for you thank you.

Also mind you this is a single 24 minute episode and there are 18 (EIGHTTEEN) points, although it is an episode deicted to the two of them, either way I ship bakudeku and this episode really did it for me.

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kob131 · 5 years ago

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Salem and ozpin were retconned Salem with the divide song was set up to be a good guy fighting aGAINST OZPINS TYRANNical government a shadow government is inherently tyrannical and ozpin was using human shields. To stop them its not her fault that he does this he is the one who used the students as human shields for the relics ( they weren’t told about the relics or the war so they didnt actually have a choice

You know what, I’m gonna bring up every single lyric of Divide and showcase just how bullshit that idea. Hell, I’ll limit myself to JUST the info we know at the end of Volume 3 to level the playing field.

Does it feel good? Knowing you tried? Knowing that all that remains Is the slow cold brutal death Of the fools that will all die in vain

Seems pretty fucking sadistic to pull for a ‘good guy’, especially since SALEM is the source of these deaths. (As the end of Volume 3 implies too). If she wanted, she could openly fight Ozpin, expose his ‘evil’ and prevent deaths. Fuck, the Grimm she is implied to control (not to mention her direct underling Cinder) cause MASSIVE amounts of innocents to die in her cause.

How does it feel Knowing your efforts will fail? All that you've built will be torn down The hope of your people assailed

Here she is taking joy in tearing down not just Ozpin’s work but also the hopes of the innocent people. She doesn’t spare the innocents, she kills them en mass for what appears to be a show in front of Ozpin.

Send your guardians They will fail Legends and heroes will crumble and fall You will not prevail

“Legends”, “heroes” and “guardians” all have positive connotations so her openly trying to destroy them is her being framed as the villain.

When allied together A threat men display Divide them with doubt It will all wash away

Still no heroic undertones yet while she’s gloating about division and washing people away, definitively MALICIOUS concepts.

One spark can incite their hope And ignite the hearts of their weary souls I will extinguish that flame

I’m pretty damn certain I don’t have to explain this one, especially since I swear I heard All For One say this shit.

Form your armies dream your dreams Make your plans and plot your schemes Send your fighters one and all Then in battle watch them fall

It was you who ended their lives Made them to dig their own graves With your dark, sick, cruel design Convinced them their world could be saved

This shit is what you’re thinking of when you say ‘Salem was retconned!’- Except for that last line. “Convinced them their world could be saved” Implying back in Volume 3 that Salem was trying to burn the world to the ground given she’s portraying opposition to her and saving the world as the same thing and MOCKS IT.

Have you no shame? Signing them up for your war Train them to fight what they can't beat Your sins are what they'll pay for Sacrifice them For your needs Slaughter is coming, the end drawing near You'll regret your deeds

Again, you just assume this is true about Ozpin even as the song portrays Salem as sadistic (that ‘fight’ is against HER and her underlings cause massive damage under HER orders. That ‘slaughter’ is HER actions.)

‘Well what ELSE could it mean?!” I have dozens upon dozens of disconnected scenes written in my heard. It’s why I can have a clear concise vision for my works. One of these scenes involves a sadistic villain facing down their heroic opponent. In it, they talk about how they abandoned their child, rejecting them and leading them down the path that ultimately got them killed by the villain. Issue is that isn’t nearly as true as it seems and it’s just the villain doing psychological harm to the hero.

Just because a villain says it doesn’t make it true. Villains can (and more often than not, will) lie just to cause pain and suffering. Especially if they personally hate their target. It’s a reflection of that need to hurt those you hate.

If anything Salem said here meant a word, she’d reach out to Ozpin’s warriors instead of shoving them in a meat grinder SHE made.

Legends and fairy tales Scattered in time Maidens and kingdoms Wrapped up in a lie

Says the leader of Cinder, a known liar and user.

These children you mislead You'll watch them all bleed Strength will not bring victory

You know, heroes don’t tend to try and hurt others just make different people suffer. In fact, I’m certain most VILLAINS don’t go that far.

Divide them Tear them apart Sever their trust It will strangle their hearts Inside them Plant seeds of doubt Hope will be smothered They'll turn on each other Hatred will sprout Suspicion and doubt Friendships deny While allegiances die The taste will be sweet When you get what you've earned And I'll watch you burn

And this is the final verse of the song. What should be, by your own words, an establishment that Salem is a good person is instead a repeated refutation of such a concept as she proclaims a desire to divide the people (in a show about strength in unity), causing betrayal and doubt, create hatred and destruction while being a sadist.

In order to believe Salem is a good person from this song, you have to ignore A. The actions of all the villains in the show previously as they all work under her while the worst offender (Cinder) answers DIRECTLY to her B. The beginning of the song. C. the end of the song and D. the tone of the song.

You can sit there and proclaim this song as proof of a retcon: even if the songs weren’t always the best representation of the show, the song contradicts you.

Face facts: you assumed Salem was a good guy because it’s every generic twist to a story ever and you guys think terms of clichés. You got pissy when Adam wasn’t the Noble Freedom Fighter cliché, you got pissy when Ruby wasn’t the Edgy Anti Hero cliché, you got pissy when Salem wasn’t the Misunderstood Good Guy cliché. It’s so obvious I could pull a Joseph Joestar every time.

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lowkeyaesthvtic · 5 years ago

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Evil Karma - Chapter 13

Chapter 1 - Chapter 12

Word Count: 2,944

Summary: The Lost Revenge Crew finally has Ben in the palm of their hands. Sofi knows exactly what to do to make him snap and fall even further into their trap.

Pairings: Harry x OC, mentions of Ben x Mal, possible Ben x Evie, Uma x OC

Rating: T for minor language, mentions of gore, and quite a bit of violence

Warnings: Minor language, mentions of descriptive gore and dead bodies, violence (both including and excluding weapons), and Ben is kinda in a hostage situation so there’s that?

Tags: @newtshairdryer @descendantofthesparrow @hookedradge @haden-oftheisle @batmanwearsabowtie

Author’s Note: Not gonna lie this might be my favorite chapter I’ve written so far. Also, I’m really sorry for the inactivity. School is kind of being a pain in the butt right now.

The walk back to the Chip Shoppe was relatively uneventful and silent. Harry was laser focused on getting back to Uma and making sure Mal held up her end of the bargain. I was laser focused on getting down to the ship’s lower deck and making sure I could do everything in my power to tear the royal beast apart. I had been so previously fixated on carrying out every small step of this plan that I had little time to focus on how it was affecting me emotionally. But, as Harry and I arrived at where we would take our separate paths, I realized that all I was seeing was red at the mere thought of Ben’s name. I could easily go in there and slash him up until his stringy intestines were burst out of his chest for me to use as jump rope. There were many fibres of my being that wandered into a euphoric haze at the idea, but my daydream was broken when Harry took my face into his hands and looked directly into me. While my mind’s eye saw red, my real eyes could see nothing but the wide sea of blue and the warm air of Harry’s eyes. “Are you ready for this, duckling? You know what to do?” He asked, grounding me in what my limits were. As much as it upset me to admit it, Ben had to come out of this alive. But it didn’t mean I wouldn’t make him wish he were dead.

“Yeah. You’ll keep an eye on Mal when she comes in?” My mind raced to Uma when I responded. We knew Mal would come to the restaurant no matter what. Whether her and Ben were on good terms or not, it’d be idiotic and a sociopolitical suicide for her to leave Ben to be tortured by a bunch of ‘wharfy pirates.’ What we weren’t certain of was whether or not she’d try to pull something. “I don’t even want to think about Uma getting hurt…” I started to speak when Harry gripped my hands tight, a tiny laugh peaking through the cracks of his rarely seen sweet smile.

“Sofi...Uma’s our Captain for a reason. Even if Mal had the balls to pull something, which she doesn’t, Uma would be able to handle her pretty quickly. Not to mention that Gil and I will be watching them the whole time. You need to take a breath and focus on the goal, here. Can you do that for me, duckling?” After a moment's hesitation, I took in a slow breath and nodded. Harry lightly kissed my head as he pulled me in for a quick embrace. “That’s my girl. Now go get us our magic, will you?” He said as he let me go and walked away.

The lower deck of the ship was definitely fit for Ben. It stood nearly bare with only me, him, the chair he was tied to and the millions of cobweb strings hung high and low across the musty room. Tiny drops of water would occasionally drip onto the creaky wood floors, adding a bit of sound to the otherwise dead silent room I walked into. Ben’s head hung low, not wanting to look me in the eye. Too bad he didn’t have a choice. Unconscious or not, he was going to be a part of this game. He had to be. I knelt down in front of him and swiftly swiped my hand across his pale cheek, sending a loud slap through the air and jolting him up. “Rise and shine, your Majesty! Nap time’s over.”

Ben looked around frantically and began to chaotically struggle at his restraints. “Where am I? What is this! You better get me out of here or I swear I’ll -”

I had trouble holding back a laugh. Clearly Ben had never been held captive before. “You’ll what? I’m already stuck in this shithole your father built. Besides, you clearly have no idea how to get out of those ropes. Not that anybody would, Gil’s gotta be the best guy with ropes on the entire Isle. So tell me, King Ben...what are you gonna do?” I smiled and confidently cocked my head to the side. Ben speedily eyed me up and down, scanning me to see if he recognized me. It took him only a few seconds of this scanning to realize that we had seen each other before.

“You...we saw each other on the street. You could have killed me.”

“But I didn’t. You’ll find out why soon, don’t worry. I could kill you now, too. But...I’m not gonna.” I replied simply as I took my dagger out of my pocket and fiddled around with the handle. His eyes widened slightly as he looked down at the blade. I smirked and pointed the tip of the blade down toward his crotch. “Relax, as long as you do what I tell you, you’ll get out completely unharmed. And I promise you, your Majesty, I don’t ask for much.”

I stood up and began to wander around the room, taking in the smell that really started to peak through once it combined with the King’s fearful sweat. “I’m going to ask you some questions. All but one will have a simple yes or no answer, but we’ll get to that one question at the end. The rules of this little game are simple, you’re going to answer each and every question with complete honesty. If you try to ask me questions, dodge your questions or even think about lying, I will know. And you’ll get a nasty cut from this little friend of mine here.” I lightly waved my dagger in his eyes like a carrot to a rabbit. “Not anything deep enough to kill you. But definitely deep enough to hurt. But as long as you follow the rules, you won’t even have to worry about it! Are we clear?” My face went from playful to a dark glare as I stood awaiting his answer.

“Why are you doing this? Do you think that tying me up and interrogating me like this is really going to get you off the Isle?” I groaned and rolled my eyes before making a quick slash up the side of his left arm. He gritted his teeth, attempting to hold back the immense amount of pain that just shot through his body.

“What did I just say? You don’t get to ask questions, Beastie Boy. All I’m asking for is your complete honesty, is that really so hard? Especially after all the shit your family has put me through?” Ben opened his mouth to speak, but was quickly silenced when he noticed the tip of my dagger edging ever so closely to his other arm. He shut off his words and quickly shook his head, finally abiding by my commands. “Good boy. Now, firstly, your father made the decision 20 years ago to bring back every single villain that had been killed...only to imprison them on an island with no magic and no way out. Yes or no?” Ben leaned back, confused at the simplicity of the question. He nods his head swiftly, allowing me to continue.

“Alright, good. Next question. A couple months back, you decided to give some of the kids born on said island a chance for redemption. So you brought to Auradon who you thought were the baddest of the bad. Son of Jafar, son of Cruella De Vil, daughter of the Evil Queen….and of course, daughter of Maleficent. Yes or no?” There was a pause in his response. A shred of hesitancy. I wasn’t going to tolerate hesitancy. I lunged my dagger into his right leg, causing an extremely pained yelp to cry out from the King. “Yes...or no?”

“Yes, yes I brought those kids to Auradon...but I didn’t think they were the baddest of the bad. I had seen one of them before and...I wanted to meet them, but I knew that one wouldn’t come without the others.” I leaned back in a bit of shock. How could he have already known about the core four if this was his first time on the Isle? “Evie...I saw her in a dream. I wanted nothing more than to meet her, to see if she were real. But I knew she wouldn’t come if I didn’t bring the rest of her friends with her.” A devilish smile crept across my face. Evie had found some way to sneak into Ben’s mind and plant the seed that lead to her and her friends escaping the Isle.

“So...even though Evie was the one you wanted to meet, Mal was the one you ended up falling in love with once these Core Four came to Auradon. Then again, I guess you didn’t fall in love with Mal naturally. She spelled you, then somewhere along the way, with her magic mixed in, she caught your eye. Yes?” With a hint of regret, he nodded his head. There was a part of him that still felt that desire to know Evie. I could definitely use that to my advantage..later. “So, given that you fell for Mal, even after the love spell wore off...she probably tells you everything. Yes or no?”

“Yes. Especially after I became King. Her and her friends came to me with a whole bunch of information about the Isle. Like she told me about-”

“Slow your roll, Beastie Boy. I decide what info you share, here. Next order of business, Mal and her friends were the ones who informed you about the corruption behind Peter Pan. Yes or no?” With a hint of reluctance, Ben nodded his head. Hopefully now he’s starting to get a hint of the kind of information I’m in need of. If not now, he would get it really soon. “So when Mal and her friends told you who Peter Pan really was, you sent her, her friends, and your strongest Auradon guards to Neverland to capture Pan and bring him to the Isle of the Lost where you felt he belonged. Yes or no?” After another swift nod, I leaned in close to the captured King. “Alright, Benny Boy. This last question’s a little different. This ain’t a yes or no kind of question, but I still need one hundred percent honesty. You think you can do that for me?” Absolute silence. Then, a slow, fearful nod. “I want you to give me the same order you gave Mal, and her friends, and those Auradon guards. The exact same order. Word for goddamn word.” I removed my dagger from his right leg and placed it against his throat. I knew for sure that I wouldn’t slice him up. But he didn’t. I had to make sure he was scared enough to give me the information I needed.

“I told them to go to Neverland, find Peter Pan, capture him and bring him to the Isle of the Lost by any means necessary.” Of course. Of course it’d be those four little words that would drive Mal and her friends and those guards over the edge. As I saw all those bloodied, gory bodies laying across the beach, staining the sand’s white pigment and leaking into the ocean, I wondered what could possibly drive someone to do something like this to a bunch of innocent boys? Now, I know. I cleaned Ben’s blood off my blade with my shirt and placed my dagger back in its sheath. I stood and couldn’t help but to slowly pace around the room silently. At first, I thought it was all Mal’s fault for telling Ben and being the one to dig the swords into their skin. It still is...but now I realize that they might have been a bit more merciful had Ben not used those four little words.

“By any means necessary, huh? Yep, there’s the ticket. You know, as a fellow leader...I should probably give you a valuable piece of advice.” I slowly leaned closer to his face before letting my fist collide with his right cheek. “Be careful what you say when you’re giving orders. Otherwise, your own words could kill hundreds!” My blaring voice rang through the musty room as I fought back the urge to continue decking him over and over again. His face showed a blatant and pained confusion.

“Fellow leader? What the hell are you talking about? Isn’t Uma the Captain?”

“You seriously haven’t gotten it through your head by now? Whatever. Who I used to be doesn’t matter. What matters is what you did. Those four little words that you threw around like they were nothing? Those words killed hundreds of innocent boys. All because you and your stupid kingdom wanted to lock up some bastard who you weren’t even gonna find anyways!”

“Okay, is this about Neverland? Because Mal told me that all of the Lost Boys were taken care of.”

“That means MURDERED, idiot! Your girlfriend and her friends went to Neverland looking to lock up my father, which they never would have been able to do anyway, and saw my Lost Boys as some kind of obstacle they had to slaughter their way past. All because of your orders.” A short growl involuntarily came from the King’s mouth. It was finally starting to work. “Do you hear that, Ben? That’s your own guilt coming to eat you alive. Do you think it’d get worse if I told you that no matter what your girlfriend did, the only place she would’ve found my father is rotting away deep in the ocean? Peter Pan’s been dead for years. We had quite the utopia going on Neverland before your army ruined it. Every boy felt loved, wanted, special. We didn’t have a whole constitution of rules tying us down. And you….you took that away!” Tiny, dark brown hairs started to grow from Ben’s face as yet another roar flowed through the room.

“What are you doing to me?” He asked worryingly, his voice starting to morph into something more animalistic.

“I’m not doing anything. Correct me if I’m wrong, Your Majesty, but you and your father shift into Beast form when in pain, yes?” Nothing but a gruffy huff in response. I can only assume that means I’m right. “One thing I’ve learned from living with hundreds of teenage boys? There is nothing more painful to a teenage boy than his own guilt consuming him.” As more of his beastly hairs continued to grow longer and thicker, I grabbed the tiny glass vial from my pocket and popped open the cork. As I quickly plucked the hairs needed for the elixir, I relished in every pained yelp he gave and smiled when his beastly roar turned into a cry of regret.

“If it makes you feel any better,” I darkly spoke as I put the cork back onto the vial, watching the beastly hairs inside turn into a cluster of gold sparkles. “Your painful guilt is about to make a lot of wharfy pirates very...very happy. Ciao.” I gave a small, playful wave before walking out of the room and to the upper deck of the ship. There, close to the mast, was Uma. Similar to when we had our first close connection, she sat looking straight out to the ocean. But this time, there was a different sort of air around her. She was waiting for something, but not very patiently. Her angelic sea smile spread across her face when she turned to see me walking towards her.

“How did it go? I heard screaming.” She asked as she softly moved closer to me.

“We’ve got everything we need. Now we just wait for the Doctor to come back with everything else. As for the screaming, let’s say that Beast is a lot easier than we thought he’d be.” I tried to keep my mind focused on the plan, how close it was to being completed and how perfectly it had been going so far. But, what I found out about my boys remained on my mind. Uma knew that too. She took my hand into hers and began smoothing over my skin with her thumb.

“I heard screaming from you too. Are you okay?” I leaned her head onto my shoulder and let go of her hand as I began to run my fingers through her braids.

“Honestly, it hurt a little bit thinking about that day again. I’ve been so busy with this plan and getting settled in the Isle that I’ve never really had the time to let it sink in. I haven’t really talked about it with anybody.”

“You can talk about it now, if you want. I’m usually not the best listener, but I can try.” That little bit of bite in the tone of her voice brought a smile to my face, just as it always has since the day I met her. I brushed off the topic and planted a soft kiss on the top of her head.

“I appreciate that. But the best thing we can do right now is make sure this plan stays in motion. Will Mal be at the ship tomorrow?” I asked, shifting the topic away from any kind of emotional struggle.

“No doubt about it. Knowing her, she’ll probably bring her friends as backup. So, what do you say, Island Girl? You ready to break some bones and melt some brains?” She asked, leaning up from my shoulder and grabbing my hands tightly in excitement.

“My dear Captain, I’ve never been more ready for something in my entire life.”

#harry hook x reader #descendants 2 #descendants harry hook #uma descendants #uma x reader #disney descendants #uma daughter of ursula #gil legume #sea three descendants #harry hook x oc x uma #descendants harry #harry hook x oc #uma x oc #harry x uma #huma x oc #huma #huma x reader

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theculturedmarxist · 6 years ago

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Risky: The Game of Global Domination

Recently an acquaintance said to me that if Donald Trump wins (or “wins” as the case may be) a second, term, there’s going to be a third World War. I don’t think they’re wrong, but not because of Donald Trump himself. Rather, it’s a matter of the current economic paradigm reaching its uttermost limits.

When I was younger, I used to love my school history textbooks. I was a fast reader and a quick study, and I loved learning. The maps always fascinated me, particularly of these ancient empires. Often my books went into detail regarding their technological and cultural innovations and the effects these empires would have on later societies and cultures.

Alexander’s empire, for example, would bring Greek thought, culture, and art to Asia. Bactria would ultimately become a hybrid Indo-Greek kingdom that would introduce Greek sculpture to the Eastern world. Before this, the Buddha was depicted symbolically as a lotus blossom. It’s after Alexander and the advent of the Seleucid Empire and the Kingdom of Bactria that the Buddha would be depicted in natural, humanistic means in freestanding sculpture. Of course, Alexander’s empire didn’t last, but it’s interesting to think about what might have been if he hadn’t died. Alas.

The Roman Empire tended to receive a great deal of attention too, perhaps for good reason. It would influence practically every country in Europe, after all, and its influence was felt as far away as Cathay. Latin was the language of learning in Europe well beyond the Renaissance. Their system of political thought, architecture, and philosophy would influence countries even in modern times, like the United States.

These kinds of maps inspired awe in me, but also numerous questions. Why didn’t the much vaunted Roman war machine just keep going? Especially in light of the numerous barbarian incursions that would ultimately do it in? Surely an empire as mighty as the Romans could manage to quell a bunch of naked, ignorant Germans. The history of Roman expansion up to Caesar Augustus was one of almost unmitigated success. What happened?

There are numerous factors at work which contribute to an explanation. One such is the nature of travel at the time: generally you went on foot or not at all. The great Inner Sea aided transport of goods and resources throughout the empire. Egypt was Rome’s breadbasket. It’s produce was essential for feeding Rome and subsequently Constantinople. While the agricultural lands of Italy were in fact rich and productive, they were long ago dominated by the Patrician class, which turned its soil towards the production of cash crops. Feeding the vast urban mobs required the importation of thousands of tons of grain, the Cura Annonae.

To put it shortly, a person could only walk so far, so fast, and resources could only be moved so quickly, so far before they began to spoil. Sun Tzu mentions in The Art of War that a single wagon of captured feed is worth ten of what an invading army brings with it. Invasions are costly, dangerous, a huge economic gamble, and this is on top of the tremendous exertions necessary to supply an army so far inland in an empire that relies on relatively speedy seaborne transportation to survive. Between these factors and the internal contradictions gnawing at the empire, it simply couldn’t expand any further.

Ultimately, this would be Rome’s downfall. For all its technology and military might, its economy relied on expansion. It would attempt to expand eastward into the Iranian plateau, but this would result only in fruitless wars first with the Parthians and then with the Sassanids. The failure or inability to expand would result in it cannibalizing itself to death until it succumbed to Germanic incursions.

In my history books, on the subject of World War I, the explanations for what precipitated the war were rather simple. The Archduke gets shot (for some reason), and the system of secret alliances, along with the military buildup within each empire, lead to the ruinous war. Sometimes it would hint that Europeans had become complacent, that they hadn’t experienced a continental war since Napoleon or the Crimea. In others the explanation was the pride instilled in populations by burgeoning nationalism. Rarely if ever was the economic dimension even mentioned.

The state of the world by the beginning of WW1 was a rather dismal one. The scramble for Africa was complete, and in Asia what wasn’t already claimed by China or one of the European powers was being scrutinized with greedy eyes by Imperial Japan. China was sick and increasingly feeble as capitalist inroads eroded the foundations of thousands of years of the Chinese Imperial system, and the importation of opium was rotting out the rest.

Essentially, whatever had been “up for grabs” had been claimed. The Americas were more or less in the de facto sphere of the United States. Almost everything else had a European flag on it (and yes, that includes the Turks). Whatever the asspained dullards on this website might blubber and shriek, imperialism isn’t the exclusive demesne of “White people.”

Countries like Germany and Italy were Johnny-Come-Latelies in regards to Imperialism. Previously, Germany would exist, insofar as it could be said to, as the “Holy Roman Empire,” which was none of those things. It was a miscellany of small, independent states with regional and religious rivalries dating back hundreds of years or more. It wouldn’t be until Napoleon that the HRE would be officially disbanded and the process of conglomeration under Brandenburg could begin in earnest. By the time there actually is a Germany, the fledgling empire would have to scramble for whatever was left.

At its apogee, just prior to the first Great War, Germany would have a population of approximately sixty-five million people. Great Britain would hardly approach that, but then she was hardly alone. The population of the British Raj was somewhere in the neighborhood of three-hundred-and-fifty million people. The Industrial Revolution was well under way by this point, but the majority of production still required manpower and labor, skilled or unskilled.

You might well imagine then that this leaves a country like Germany, even with its scant and marginal colonies, at a severe disadvantage. Napoleon would plant the seeds not only of the German Empire, but German Industry. To compete, Germany would need by necessity to become a sophisticated industrial power if it wanted to have a hope against the hundreds of millions of people in the British or French or Russian Empires. The same would go for Japan as well. It didn’t take a genius to see that it was either colonize or be colonized.

By 1914, the Imperial economic system had reached its limit. There was nowhere left to colonize, explore, or claim. While increasingly feeble, China was still too formidable (and profitable) to simply invade and annex. At last the European Empires had to confront one another, like it or not, and the military buildup prior to this conflict is testament to that fact.

Suppose for a moment if you were to imagine the GDP of these industrial empires as singular units produced at the end of every year, the sum-total of production traditional and industrial. If the British Empire produces 2 and the German Empire produces 1, then the first year it would be 2:1, the second 4:2, the third 6:3, and so on. This is without taking into consideration the accumulative effect of industrial and technological development. The BE wouldn’t only produce 2, then 4, then 6, but 2.1, 4.4, 6.8, and Germany 1.1, 2.2, 3.4, 4.5. The British simply have more men and women working and producing than Germany. That’s more people to work the fields, factories, and universities. Without intervention Germany would be doomed to lag behind Britain, subject to its economic domination.

While factors such as nationalization and secret treaties contributed, the economic dimension was the main precipitate of the conflict. These unresolved contradictions would in turn go on to produce the second World War. Lebensraum wasn’t some idle delusion of der Fuhrer, but an economic necessity if German Industry hoped to compete on a planet a full quarter of which was the exclusive domain of the British Crown, not to mention the other empires of the world at the time. One must either upset the paradigm or resign oneself to subjugation. The Second World War would resolve some of these contradictions and pave the way not only for the “Cold War” ostensibly between Western Democracy and Eastern Communism, but also the unprecedented expansion of Capital.

I have only the vaguest recollection of the fall of the Soviet Union. I recall the 90s as being a time of unbridled enthusiasm and optimism in the US. Finally, without the thorn of The Evil Empire in our side, we could do all the great things we dreamed of. Communism was dead, and American Freedom and Democracy were the things that buried it. The threat of nuclear annihilation evaporated like a bad dream. It was a new world, but much too similar to the old one.

There’s an ancient Vulcan proverb: “only Nixon could go to China,” and he did, making inroads for global capital in the process. When the USSR was finally disintegrated (or dismantled), the ideological and economic counterpode to the US was suddenly gone. The unifying ideological force in the United States was gone, and for all intents and purposes whatever impediment to capital along with it. I don’t think I’ll shed any tears for the USSR, but however one slices it, the US and all which that entails was almost entirely unopposed. The pretense of international law would keep NATO from running roughshod over what remained of these ideological holdouts, but there was no longer opposition significant enough to stop the US from doing whatever it wanted to do. The “hard power” of the US military worked in tandem with the “soft power” of organizations like the IMF and World Bank to spread the good news of laissez-faire capitalism, which brings us inexorably to now.

Capital has suffused practically every country on the planet. Even old communist (or “communist”) holdouts like Cuba and North Korea are softening their stance on private enterprise, such is their theoretical and economic sterility. China, rather than being a cautionary tale of reactionary revisionism in the face of dealing with capitalism is seen as an example to be emulated. The treatment of workers there is infamous, the oppression of workers seeking to organize obscenely blatant. China would even come to the rescue of global capital in the 07/08 financial crisis. The complete collapse of the global economic system would be prevented by what should have been its greatest enemy. Alas.

Expansion is a necessity for capitalist economies. It is completely unavoidable and totally essential to its survival. By its nature, capitalism collects wealth and concentrates it, thus depriving itself of the very lifeblood it needs to function. If there is no one capable of consuming, that is without the capital with which to consume, then whence cometh production? Production to the ultimate excess is an integral feature of capitalism as well. The more of a commodity is produced, the lesser the scarcity, and subsequently its diminished value, actual or perceived. A tremendous mound of wealth is piled up which no one can access, because the tokens of access are monopolized by an incredibly few number of people, who have no need for the knick-knacks and baubles they produce to amuse the proletariat. It molders while millions starve, for no other reason than spiteful greed.

We’re left then under circumstances not unlike that in the early 20th century. Capital has no place else to expand, no other great mineral or material wealth to appropriate and exploit. The capitalists realize this as well. The US is spending trillions to prepare for an inevitable showdown with Russia or China or both. It’s the ultimate conclusion of the so-called “New American Century,” the reactionary effort to ensure American hegemony in the face of the Russia petro-state and the constantly developing economic, technological, and demographical weight of China. As climate collapse progresses, these contradictions are only going to come into sharper and more pronounced relief. Clinton began it with adventures in the Balkans. Bush II continued it in crushing practically defenseless nations in the Middle East. Obama exacerbated it with his “Pivot to Asia.” Trump continues it with his reckless bellicosity towards Iran and North Korea. The military efforts of each of these administrations points towards the purposeful isolation of China and Russia. The Pentagon seeks to crush any potentially unfriendly states, great or small, with the long term goal of depriving their chief adversaries of any succor in what they imagine to be the conflict to come. History shows us just how frequently out of touch the military establishment is with reality. America is convinced of its own special place in history, its uniqueness, and absent any enemy of respectable capability, its invincibility. Time and again the US military has been proven demonstrably wrong, and time and again they fail to learn this lesson.

Ironically, their integration into global capital is what painted the target onto China and Russia’s backs. The Chinese working class has becoming wealthy at the expense of the American and European working classes. The sale of necessary petro-chemicals and China’s status as “the workshop of the world” have concentrated vast sums of capital within them. Every passing day bleeds the West dry and enriches the East. While an inevitable motion of the Invisible Hand, this is viewed as an unacceptable aberration by American and European capitalists. Lesser capitalists in so-called emerging economies or developing countries, such as Brazil, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and so on, can sense the direction of the wind as well and are seeking to align themselves against their regional rivals. History might look back and recognize that we are in the opening moves of this next great conflict already. Russia is taking an aggressive stance at home and abroad to stymie American efforts. China spreads roots ever deeper into African soil, a continent that the US views as its sole domain. Trump diverted two carrier groups to the Sea of Japan to intimidate North Korea and by extension China, and even went so far as to invade Syria in complete contravention of international law and shoot down a Russian jet.

2019 isn’t exactly like 1919, however. For better or worse, our technology has advanced substantially, dangerously. Nuclear weapons are more potent than they were at their advent in the last century, but the threat of mutually assured nuclear annihilation disappeared with the USSR. Two generations now have grown up ignorant of the nuclear specter hanging over them. Nuclear war is something for movies and history books. No one talks about it. No one mentions it.

Advances in technology have always cut deepest the working class. Industrial machinery obviated the need for millions of serfs. Telecommunications technology has in our day obviated the need for billions of workers. Perhaps an even greater deterrent to the bourgeoisie pressing The Button and annihilating the world in atomic hellfire was the inescapable economic losing prospect that would ensue. Money would be worthless. Material wealth would be destroyed. The millions of human chattel they required to facilitate their life styles would be turned to dust. It’s one thing to take the other guy with you into oblivion, it’s another thing entirely to go blithely marching into it yourself.

Now, however, the bourgeoisie have no use for the reserve army of the working class. Machinery has become so sophisticated that whole factories can operate without so much as a breathing janitor. Rather than a begrudging asset, the working class represents a liability. We can all see what is happening to the planet. We can all see what capitalism is doing to us and the people we love. The bourgeoisie can see the inevitability of the proletarian backlash to their excess, stupidity, and greed. They push STEM subjects on the workers while keeping the Humanities for themselves. They know their history and know it well. They know what happens when the peasants have had enough cake.

Whether because they actually believe it or have deluded themselves with the fantasy, the American missile shield that has been so carefully erected around China, Iran, and Russia is a white elephant. It doesn’t work, even with all the cards stacked in its favor. That doesn’t really matter, though. Capitalism doesn’t care whether or not something works, only that it is believed in enough that rubes will buy it. Whether the Pentagon and NATO know this or not, they are still basing their future plans around the supposed functionality of this system. They either believe or wish to believe that, in the event of a nuclear exchange, they will be reasonably shielded from the infernal holocaust which will ensue. The bourgeoisie is ever superficial. They don’t care for culture or history. Let New York be flattened. Let the Louvre be incinerated. Vaporize the Kremlin and annihilate the Forbidden City. These aren’t losses to them after all. They only care for something insofar as it profits them, and nothing is more profitable than the prospect of rebuilding a city, a country, a civilization, and best of all it would be a civilization in their own image—the ultimate bourgeois revolution! As they emerge from their bunkers and silos to a silent planet, they’d have the technology, resources, and know-how to put the pieces back together again. No more Marxism to rile up the impertinent slaves. No more democracy to impede their whims. No more gods to flaunt their authority above these earthly masters. Just the rule of Gold, and those who have it. Finally, there will be resources aplenty, even in the event of complete ecological devastation. There will be only the bourgeois and their retainers. Atomic fire reduced the stupid, teeming billions to dust, a happy little accident of the nuclear conflagration. Not a tear would be shed, only sighs of relief. It turns out you can take it with you, and by this they establish their heaven on earth.

2019 isn’t 1919. Our circumstances are different, and perhaps even more urgent than those of the working class of generations past. The ravages of capitalism have left our planet irreparably damaged. The most intense period of reaction, through the Cold War and on through the collapse of the Soviet Union to today have rendered the Left, such as it is, fractured, impotent, and broken. Capital has learned its history well and spends billions in order to keep the proletariat under its massive thumb. To say that things were dire would be putting it mildly.

But all is not lost.

The Second International was undone by the first World War. Abandoning the ideal of Internationalism, millions of workers rallied to their nations’ calls and killed themselves by the millions. The development of a global consciousness existed but only in an embryonic state.

Just as Lenin said, the Capitalists will sell us the rope we hang them with. The ubiquity of American culture has created, like it or not, a layer of universality that spreads across the globe. The Internet too has facilitated the development of an international proletarian culture. The sophistication of travel, both domestic and foreign, has likewise spread the roots and seedlings of an international understanding that supersedes parochial tribalism. “Globalism,” or so it is called, has done the marvelous work of eroding the sanctity of the nation-state. The bourgeoisie is scrambling to undo the damage, but there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle. That borders are superfluous, even authoritarian, is an idea gaining coin and traction among all levels of the working class. Those that have circumvented them have no respect for them. Those trapped by them harbor growing resentment to the limits of their cage. The injustice is plain to those with plenty made to look out at the starving multitude, whose starvation enables their own feasting. Even those unsympathetic to the cause of labor are ground to dust by the ever proliferating demands of capital exploitation. Even those mode deluded and devoted workers are breaking down physically, mentally, spiritually beneath the onslaught of capitalism.

Unions in the US are standing up with growing confidence. Workers there and abroad are beginning to realize just how precarious the situation they find themselves in. India was host to the largest organized labor action in history not two years ago. Teachers in the US are growing restive beneath the weighty boot of austerity. The insanity of the Right, unguided by political ideology or personal conviction, lashes out like cowards only at the most vulnerable. Only the Left offers refuge to this vile, stupid violence. Only solidarity offers respite to the corrosive forces of capitalist economics. The Right consists only of the weak. The Left constitutes a plethora, weak and strong, whose collaboration makes the whole stronger. The Right needs a mythological father figure to have coherence and purpose. The Left is propelled by the collective will of all, towards the collective benefit of all. Cut the head off a snake and it will wriggle like a worm until it dies. Cut the head off a hydra, and two more take its place.

This should not be taken lightly. The labors ahead will take the collective effort, the unified dedication, and total collaboration of all of us. We not only have to prevent our own deaths, but preserve our planet. We not only have to ameliorate the wrongs of the past, but build a future congenial to all. We’re faced not only by the most developed, wealthy, entrenched plutocracy in history, armed with the most advanced weaponry and politico-military theory, but one which has spent the last century preparing for exactly such a conflict. Our work is cut out for us, to say the least.

But we can do it. We have to do it. There isn’t any other option, any other alternative. We either survive as a whole or perish alone. We either achieve socialism or succumb to barbarism. The dialectic, always in motion, has brought us to this point, to this ultimate historical moment and we will either rise to meet it or be crushed beneath it, without a whimper, anonymous bones lamented and remembered by no one. There is only one possible conclusion, and you know it. We all know it. All we have left is to embrace it.

Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains, and a world to win!

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