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plutoasteroids · 2 months ago

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PAC - How Will Your FS' Siblings Feel About You

This is a general reading so take what resonates and leave what doesn't. Especially because not everyone's FS has siblings so if you aren't drawn to a pile that could be why or there are just no messages for you in this reading.

THIS READING IS ALLEGEDLY FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY. I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANY CHOICES MADE IN RELATION TO MY READINGS!

Pile 1 is the picture of Alexa Demie in sunglasses

Pile 2 is the Black and White picture

Pile 3 the picture with Fairy wings

Pile 4 The picture with her holding a knif3

PILE 1

Okay I do feel like your FS' siblings may be unsure of you at first because you might be someone completely different from their usual type for example you could be of a different race or background that they aren't used to so they may feel a bit sceptical about you especially at the very early stages of them getting to know you. Regardless of a tough first impression I feel like most of their siblings will eventually like you but there is one sibling that will hate your guts and the reasons could vary from person to person but overall it's just this vibe of them feeling like you aren't good enough for their sibling (your fs) and to be honest I don't think that specific sibling will ever like you there is a lot of deep-rooted jealousy and insecurity that you trigger in them without you knowing but anyways it won't affect your marriage/ relationship with your fs or the rest of their family. For the actually nice siblings of your fs, I feel like you will all have a lot of fun together going on adventures and trips and just enjoying life. At some point which will be pretty early on they might even start seeing you as their sibling and it will feel like things aren't complete if you aren't there too (sooo sweet). To be honest I feel you will have a specific one of your fs sibling that you will be super super close with just the connection is flowy and fun, it will feel like you guys are life long best friends. Don't worry about the one hater they genuinely won't matter, it will be annoying but it won't matter. Your fs family will be on your side and your fs side so they will immediately shut down the bs every time they act out of line.

PILE 2

Okayyyy so you guys are my controversial pile lmfaooo. So, upon first impression your fs' siblings will definitely find you confident, sexy alluring, badass and just glamorous. You take care of yourself and dress well and they can see that some more than others. I feel like you won't necessarily have a friendly relationship with your fs' siblings it will be more civil than anything especially because I feel like you won't see them much, so you won't get the chance to build a deeper relationship with them. I also feel like you have your fs wrapped around your little finger and they do notice this it's honestly obvious to everyone that your fs worships the actual ground you walk on but anywayssss. To the controversial bit I do feel like your fs will have a sibling that will have a bit of a crush on you but its nothing more than an innocent crush and it won't develop into anything more and I do feel like it will be something that will be joked about for a long time. My pile 2 I feel like you will be marrying into money. So overall this will be a very civil relationship with them no hate, no jealousy, you just get along with them well especially on the few ocassions that you do and will see them.

PILE 3

Okay, they will view you as pretty innocent. They may be the type to make overtly inappropriate jokes and you may not react to them, or you will seem confused making you innocent in their eyes. I feel like your fs' siblings are more on the loud, fun, obnoxious side and you aren't like that so to them they will view you as quite shy and reserved because you aren't acting as loud and carefree as they are. I feel like you are the type to use logic and be more observant in situations involving people which will extend to them feeling like you are quite cold towards them which isn't the caseagain because oyu are more of an observer than someone who will engage inw hatever they are doing. They may not necessarily like you nor will they ahte you because you will still be quite polite it's just that you won't engage in their version of fun which may make them see you as stuck up and a bit boring. Overall, the relationship here feels a bit rough round the edges but it will get better with time as you all learn each other they will understand that it's just how you are and there is no bad blood between all of you.

PILE 4

This pile is not afraid to get down and dirty. You are outspoken, confident and the no bullshit type. You may like things direct and straight to the point which might honestly catch people off guard and in this case your fs' siblings. I feel like they may have grown up in a setting where you have to always be polite or pick your words carefully, but you aren't like that which might come as a shock and will take a lot of getting used to on their end. I feel like there is equal learning, you learning to be more sensitive because not everyone takes being overly direct well ad them learning that you mean well but you are just very open and outspoken. I feel like overall though they will like you and you will get along quite well with them it will just take some getting used to each other. I wouldn't say you will be the best of friends, but you will certainly get along well with each other, and you will make good memories together. They will learn to let loose, and you will have wild, childlike fun...eventually.

#astro community #astrology #tarot cards #tarot reading #tarotblr #tarotcommunity #divination #free tarot reading #daily tarot #pick a card #future spouse pick a card #future spouse #pick a pile #paid readings #future spouse tarot #future spouse astrology #future spouse reading

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somedayillbepeterpan · 5 months ago

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I have gone down this rabbit hole now and I'm afraid I'm never getting out. I hope I give justice to this. And sorry if this is long.

I've seen a lot of the Colin and Marina vs. Colin and Penelope analyses in here and I want to raise this parallel as to how the Butterfly ball was such a powerful move for both Penelope and Colin. We all have our issues with how they handled Pen and Colin finding their way back to each other but let me add this perspective and hope it helps us understand how real they handled the issue of LW and pushed the character development for them both.

The scene on the left is from S01e06 (Swish) and the right is S03e08 (Into the Light)

S1 scene - Violet is still in her dressing gown, obviously distraught having just read something from LW. She hears someone come down and finds Colin.

S3 scene - Violet is dressed for the morning and her face looks a combination of surprise and confusion after reading a letter. She turns around when she hears someone coming down the stairs.

In both scenes, we see Colin coming down the stairs.

S1 - we only see Colin's back. We're in suspense on what emotional state he is in but we do know that he's on his way to elope with Marina.

In S3 - we see Colin's face immediately looking determined and ready. We see Violet calling his name quite urgently.

S1 - Colin sees his mother's face looking like a combination of disappointment and anger. He asks what's happening. She doesn't say anything but just looks at Colin with a sadness that only a mother can give.

S3 - Violet pointedly says that she received a letter from Colin's wife (I love this line so much) that sounds awfully like "I need you to explain what's happening right now."

S1 - Violet hands Colin LW without saying anything and just looks so so so sad. Colin is shocked to his core because we learn that LW (Pen) exposes Marina's pregnancy and that she has been pregnant from the beginning of the season.

S3 - Colin determinedly faces his mother telling her that they had better sit. And I'm guessing that Colin tells her everything.

Where am I going with this? (Gosh, doing an analysis is hard 😂)

The first time Colin fell in love (thought he fell in love), he was blindsided. But I believe the pain he felt at that time was made deeper because his family had to save him from the situation (Anthony explaining that his actions in the scandal will affect his sisters' prospects as well). To think that it was his mother who first learned of the situation added salt to the wound because we all know that he is a mama's boy and that the one person he dislikes letting down is his mother.

The second (and last time) Colin falls in love, he once again feels betrayed. But he's fallen in love so deeply that he can't imagine his life without Pen. The struggle he goes through in understanding his emotions was very hard to watch and it's because the issue goes beyond his and Pen's relationship. It extends to his family.

Colin's hero complex goes beyond feeling worthy of Pen's love but also worthy of the Bridgerton name. We see it several times in S3 when he mentions it in his confrontation with Portia (" I advise you not to sully our Bridgerton name...") and when Pen tells him that Cressida discovered her secret ("It will besmirch our Bridgerton name. The entire family").

The whole sequence in the study is now more significant because of what Pen addresses in their conversation-- Colin's family ("Your family... the one you so kindly shared with me, they are too good").

Pen's "sacrifice" ("But I can no longer conceal the biggest piece of information I have. My identity."), I believe, was to save the Bridgerton family (once again) and she asks Colin to stand by her as she formulates and executes this plan.

It was very important that Pen wrote a letter to Violet directly and that Colin was there right after she's read it to explain everything. From this point on, they were a team. From this point on, Colin moves in parallel with Pen instead of against it. Colin finally sees that version of Pen that she's always been even while she was LW-- the person who was always determined to save his family just as much as he does.

From this point on, their goals were aligned.

10 rewatches after, I finally see how Colin found his way back to Pen. It wasn't very obvious to me how he got over the feelings of betrayal after he discovered Pen was LW. Of course, him reading the letters help but the events leading up to the Butterfly ball, helped him see her as both Pen and Lady Whistledown and the overflowing pride we see on his face was heart-melting to watch.

From this point on, they finally see each other eye to eye. From this point on, they finally accept this version of each other.

If you got to the end, thanks for reading my humble musings.

*Editing to add this: The Butterfly Ball deep dive series

#Butterfly ball #analysis #gosh this was hard to write #polin #bridgerton #nicola coughlan #netflix #luke newton #bridgerton seaosn 3 #bridgerton season three #netflix bridgerton #bridgerton s3 #bridgerton season 3 #peterpanbutterflyball

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star-suh · 9 months ago

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Don't Chew More Than You Can Swallow

Johnny Suh x Male Reader

cw: top johnny, pseudo-incest, underwear kink, musk kink, degradation, praising, breeding, hickeys, blowjob, deepthroat, manhandling, implied size kink, snowballing, age gap (yn is 20 and johnny is 25).

an: this is the other idea from @ldrei

also i was lazy to think about names for the mom and the stepfather so yuh.

—

“ok yn, i want you to put on a smile on that face we're almost near the house” yn's mom said while driving towards their new home.

some years ago yn was part of a loving and happy family until one day his father, an honorable police officer, died during a raid against a gang. yn and his mother were devastated, mourning his death for the next couple of months. but life goes on and we have to let go and move on, right? after like a year yn's mother started dating another police officer, months later they made their relationship official and decided to get married, which brings us to the beginning of the story, yn and his mother would move to their new home, where yn's new father and new brother, a 25 years old guy, live already.

“hello we're home” yn's mom greeted, “hey honey” yn's stepdad appeared and kissed her, “hey yn, how are you?”; “i'm good.. thanks” he replied, “glad to know that” the older man said with a smile on his face.

yn walked towards the kitchen searching for a glass to drink some water, “the cups are up there” someone said, yn turned around and there he was his new stepbrother “the name's johnny” he extended his hand and yn grabbed it to shake it, his hand was way bigger than yn's, “i'm yn.. n-nice to meet you” he laughed nervously, “i say the same, see you later then” johnny said winking at him and waving a goodbye.

a couple of months have passed, everything was going good for everyone except for yn. he was thirsting over johnny 24/7, when he walked around the house with just a short on and no underwear because he can clearly see his bulge swing around everytime he walks, his body is to die for ‘god i wish i could lick those abs right now’ thought yn. it was even more harder for yn to not think about johnny fucking him when he was on the room next to him rearranging some woman's insides, the banging sounds going straight to yn's ears, ‘i wish that was me’ he thought. and that's the only thing yn can do, fantasize about him because well… his stepbrother is straight.

johnny sent yn to search something in his room, he did as he was told but something catches his attention, a pair of underwears resting on a pile of clothes. driven by his impulses, he grabbed one and began to sniff it, his face immediately turning red and a bulge growing in his pants "johnny~" he moaned softly.

he went quickly to his room, locked the door and began to jerk off, wrapping the underwear around his cock sliding it up and down while biting a pillow to suppress the moans.

the weeks passed and yn's desire for johnny only increased. every time johnny brought someone home to fuck, while his parents were away, yn always masturbated listening to their moans.

one day yn was masturbating again with his the underwear until a voice interrupted him, "hey yn!" a shirtless johnny called opening the door with a bang "what the hell were you doing? i've been calling you for a while" he asked with a somewhat angry tone. "sorry johnny, what do you want?" yn questioned, "these last few months you have been the one picking the dirty clothes to take them to the laundry room, have you by any chance seen my underwear? they have been missing” he scratches his head. “i have no idea johnny” yn replied with a nervous laugh. “hmm… it's okay” and just like that, johnny left.

worried that johnny would find out, he grabbed all the dirty clothes and ran down to the laundry room. there he turned on the washing machine and placed the underwear there and just when he was going to press the button to start the washing cycle a big hand stopped him, a low and very deep voice whispered in his ear "i thought you didn't know where my fucking underwear was" the warm breath sending shivers down his spine, “you're such a dirty pervert yn” he laugh was deep and sexy.

“j-johnny i-i” yn didn't know what to do, “you thought you were slick with it but no, did you think i didn't notice how you stared at me every time i walked around the house shirtless, how your eyes went from my abs to my bulge, shit i even could feel how you fucked me with your eyes”. johnny positioned himself behind yn, his huge bulge rubbing against yn's ass, "even every night i fucked someone i could hear your slutty moans on the other side of the wall, how you moaned my name was… so sexy... now i kinda want to hear them again" the taller was leaving small kisses on yn's neck, he then took out his huge cock from his shorts and rubbed it on yn's clothed ass “do you want to taste my cock, yn?", his sexy low voice doing things down there on yn's crotch area.

“j-johnny” yn stuttered “i-i'm sorry” a little moan escaping his mouth. “if you want to apologize you have to take responsibility about this” he slams his thick heavy cock against yn's ass again. “y-yes” yn fell to his knees and started kissing the tip, using one hand to stroke the rest of the shaft while the other was stroking his own.

“you're so nasty yn, look at you sucking at your brother's cock. aren't you such a nasty slut huh?” johnny grabs his head and starts to mouthfuck him, forcing yn to deepthroat him, “come on you can do more than that, it's barely halfway in”, little by little yn swallowed it all, johnny locked his head with his arms. the gagging sounds being like music to his ears. “there you go, you're doing so good for me”.

johnny lifted yn and fold him against the washing machine, rubbing the tip of his cock in the other's hole “want me to destroy you, cockwhore?” he says once again using that sexy low voice that drives yn crazy “p-please~ do it”.

johnny was slamming so hard that the washing machine was moving too, yn's legs were shaking due to how good johnny was fucking him, "how does my little fucktoy feel.. is this what you wanted? my thick, heavy cock opening your ass?"; “yes johnny please wreck me” yn replied withiut thinking, “so desperate”.

johnny lifted yn and carried him from the laundry room to his bedroom but without stopping fucking him. the thrusts were slow but as powerful as the harsh ones because he always manages to brush yn's prostate with the tip of his cock, drawing whimpers out of his mouth that made johnny chuckle, ‘so cute’ he thinks.

they're finally on the bedroom, johnny throw yn towards his bed, attacking his neck with kisses and leaving some bruises here and there. his big, tall body towering over yn's. “i have a deal for you” the taller comments, “if you can take me without cumming you'll be my little fucktoy boyfriend. what do you think?” he keeps on kissing yn's body until he reaches the nipples and suck on them. “hngh i really w-want that” the bottom squirmed.

the fat cock went in and out, going in even harder than the last time, johnny's balls slapping against yn's ass “who's being a good cockwhore?” the top asks, “m-... me” yn struggles to answer due to the harsh thrusts “i'm johnny's g-good cockwhore”.

“but you're only mine right?”.

“yeah i'm only yours…”.

both sealed the deal with a gentle kiss, contrasting with the rough thrusts. “fuck i'm gonna cum” johnny growls, he took advantage of the fact that his cock reached so deep inside yn to make him cum, however he let himself be carried away by the moment and filled yn's ass up with that warm sperm.

yn barely managed to hold off his cumming so johnny now has to fulfill the deal they just made. "it seems like i'm your little fucktoy boyfriend now"; "i think so," johnny adds, “and a cute one”.

“you took me so well pretty boy, i think you deserve a threat” and as he said that he went down and started to suck yn's cock “j-johnny you don't have to~”; “mmm mmm, i want to, prince” the sweet name embarrasing yn so much that he covered his face with his arms, feeling the little chuckle the taller let out. with a few more strokes yn came inside johnny's mouth, “shit that's some good blowjob johnny” yn rode his high while johnny crawls up until he is face to face with yn, with one hand he opens the bottom's mouth and spits the sperm in there, then kisses and plays with it between their mouths.

johnny carries yn to the bathroom where they both take a bath, then get dressed and fall asleep in the bed.

“look at them, aren't they cute” yn's mom said watching them both sleeping while hugging, “yeah i think they're gonna be good brothers” the stepdad adds with a huge smile in his face.

#johnny suh x male reader #johnny seo x male reader #johnny x male reader #johnny suh x male reader smut #johnny seo x male reader smut #seo youngho x male reader #seo youngho x male reader smut #male reader #kpop x male reader #kpop x male reader smut #smut #male reader smut #nct x male reader #nct smut #nct 127 x male reader #nct 127 smut #nct u x male reader #nct u smut

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glamaphonic · 8 months ago

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i did this for rick so as promised my personal headcanon on the trajectory of michonne's feelings for rick

the most fun thing for me about this is that even though i would say that michonne is generally quite emotionally astute, it actually takes her way waaaaay longer than rick to be able to recognize what's going on between them

rick and michonne are so similar in terms of the things that drive them, that move them, that are most important to them (as gimple said: they have the same soul) and her entire approach to their relationship is basically tied into the fact that she and rick had inverse experiences at the very beginning of the apocalypse. he set out to find his family and did. whereas michonne had her family and lost them.

so she closes it all down, decides to just go away, but she can't really escape who she is, so she helps andrea. and this starts the recurring pattern in michonne's character arc where she repeatedly comes to these decision points where she has to make a choice between giving in to the nothingness or being herself (someone who is loving, compassionate, a protector) and every time she makes the choice to be true to herself, it invariably leads her to rick and their family

so from the moment they meet in s3 she is also viscerally drawn to him the same way he is to her, and like him there is no way she's in a place to even begin to process this. but she sought him out specifically because she was making that choice, to look for connection and community, and she sees who he is pretty much immediately, and so extends him this profound trust over and over again because who he is, what she sees in him, is fundamentally why she wants to be a part of that community.

in 4a, michonne's trauma has her turned every which way. she's already grown attached to rick and to carl and her reaction to this is to keep one foot out the door; to not be fully present for the community. to try to keep her distance even though while she's away she's still obviously thinking about her grimes boys all the time, i.e. bringing them back gifts, etc. and then the prison falls and it seems to justify her caution.

in 4b, she comes to one of those decision points and when she chooses to seek connection and community, it returns her to rick and carl. in my other post i note that this is where rick claims her as a grimes, but this is also where michonne fully commits. she claims them too. she accepts that they are hers. and of course we all know, and danai has even pointed out, the exact moment michonne fully falls in love with rick, when it clicks somewhere inside of her that it's only ever going to be him. but she's still nowhere near ready to consciously face that.

in 5a and through to 5b, just like rick she's not spending time examining what they've become. it just is. that's her family. they belong to each other.

towards the end of 5b, when rick starts to Realize, michonne doesn't because she instead actively sublimates the fact that she is in love with rick, that she has regained what she lost during the turn, into her general dedication to community. she puts everything into trying to shepherd their community without acknowledging her personal stake. which is what leads us to:

the end of 5b and through 6a during which michonne has to have 3 or 4 different people pretty much say to her face HEY YOU GET THAT YOU’RE MARRIED TO RICK AND RAISING CHILDREN WITH HIM RIGHT? YOU GET THAT BEYOND FOSTERING A COMMUNITY ON A MACRO LEVEL YOU HAVE A WHOLE ASS HUSBAND AND TWO KIDS? YOU GET THAT YOU DESERVE TO EMBRACE THIS THING THAT IS FOR YOU SPECIFICALLY AND LIVE A FULL LIFE?

but that final wall is so hard to get past because that wound is so deep, she has to sit with all of that for a good long while (she's working up to it), and it still takes carl basically openly declaring that she's his mother and rick actually making the move before she finally lets herself see, in that moment, what was already long since there.

and it's just very delicious to me personally that from 4a on rick was hers for the taking, honestly. all she had to do was say the word, but she wasn't ready to take him until that moment on the couch.

#talmbout #richonne #twd

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presbierue · 3 months ago

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This is a head canon I have held for so long I have to frequently have to remind myself it’s not real but here we go.

I think Armitage Huxes mother was half Alderaanian, half Arkanian.

Hear me out.

So this head canon was born in the year 2016. I had just watched my 3rd Star Wars movie (TFA) and was desperate to know what would happen next. I had watched Phantom Menace and most of the Clone Wars growing up, so I trusted the consistency of lore across tie-in media (I am the only sci fi fan in my family and relied heavily on what was available on television). And very quickly after TFA I read Bloodline by Claudia Grey and it remains one of my fav Star Wars books. I trusted everything in Bloodline would be used to help define the prequels as it was one of the only canonical post-original trilogy media pieces at the time (it was an optimistic time where I thought they 100% knew exactly where they were going with the sequels).

There are a few short sequences in Bloodline that justify this line of thinking, but they all reinforced the idea that Arkanis and Alderaan have been allied for hundreds of years. It’s like a D plot, but Leia Organa was in line to potentially take over as the figurehead monarch of Birren but turned it down and it went to an Arkanian. This was because Birren was settled by both Arkanis and Alderaan, so either planet could put forward a noble when the current monarch died without children and Leia just happened to be the closest living relative (and Alderaan was gone). But that’s kind of weird, right? Like, Canada and Denmark technically share jurisdiction of Hans Island but no one lives there so there isn’t a division of national allegiances. But either way, it implied Alderaan and Arkanis were on good terms; they didn’t war over control of Birren and shared it to the point that which monarchy takes priority is a matter of who married in last (it is somehow not a conflict of interests in terms of an independent world being influenced by other monarchs). Dual citizenship might have been a thing (loyalty to two or more monarchs). Like yeah, Leia not being eligible for her own throne was a thing but it does imply that if the Organas adopted Luke as well and they never fought the Empire, Luke would be king of Birren.

Where was I? Oh yeah, Arkanis. Armitage Hux’s home world.

So these two worlds functionally had split custody of Birren in terms of who could be constitutional monarch. So both Arkanians and Alderaanians would have probably intermarried and shared cultural knowledge with each other on Birren for hundreds of years. They likely still visit their extended relatives on their progenitor worlds and have good tourism opportunities with each other and have exchange programs for children and stay engaged with each other via things similar to the commonwealth games (all the British Colonies meet up every few years and have their own separate Olympics). Like these worlds probably have a high degree of influence on each other and would ally with the other under duress because their citizens needs are kind of interlinked in this relationship. And when Alderaan is destroyed, the largest remaining communities of Alderaanians would be on Birren and potentially Arkanis. The Empire probably intensified their presence on Birren and Arkanis immediately after Alderaan to prevent the Rebellion from getting a foothold there (too many sympathetic relatives), and may have contributed to why it was so late to leave Arkanis afterwards (they had a stockpile of resources to help suppress any public uprisings so they could fight there longer).

Arkanians also look incredibly human (just super pale skin and hair if you squint at Dagan Gera you can’t even really tell he isn’t human and he is in the canon so Arkanians as a species do exist). So it could be hard to distinguish who is descended from who on these worlds after a few generations.

This isn’t really enough to tell me what Armitage Huxs mother looks like, but it does tell me a little about the kind of worlds she might have grown up in and why a very human looking maid was on Arkanis. Because yeah, Armitage Hux is definitely very human looking (Star Wars genetics are unclear and trait expression is really varied in our world but they don’t have the actor in any makeup for the role so I’m leaning on that). But Arkanis has its own species, so why is a human woman on Arkanis as working as a maid (a role in literature that is usually used to indicate a character is low class/impoverished). Either she didn’t have better options (no access to Alderaan or other wealthy human worlds) or took the position in order to spy on imperial inhabitants of the house (likely for the rebellion or Saw Gerrera). Either way, she probably would have looked like she belonged on Arkanis. She fit the environment she was in enough that it didn’t warrant analysis or note. But also she probably didn’t look alien enough to gross out the Imperials living there.

So Hux’s Mum might be an Arkanian who largely appears Alderaanian. Her parents may be a first or second generation Alderaanian and Arkanian or entirely from Birren. It wouldn’t likely be super apparent based on her appearance alone. The Empire probably wouldn’t super care about the differences either after the destruction of Alderaan. She’d be the worst of both worlds: an alien (the Empire doesn’t like them) and a human traitor (any Alderaanian is likely going to be a rebellion sympathizer by the time Armitage is conscious). If this theory is true, she was probably executed as a traitor, regardless of whether she was a spy or not. It would have been easy for Brendol or Maratelle to have her killed at any time and both of them have reasons to hate her (mistress/mother of a child they see as embarrassing).

I just like the angst it add to Armitage Hux’s character. Because a part of why he builds Starkiller becomes an affirmation of his Imperial/First Order identity: that he IS human, he ISN’T Alderaanian or Arkanian, and that he IS as good if not better than the original Imperials. He DESERVES to lead, to hold power. He isn’t a traitor like his mother who he would have been compared against for his entire childhood. Hell, he probably never met an Alderaanian or Arkanian who wasn’t in objectively horrifying conditions and he would probably would be at least a little terrified of ending up like them (my guess is he would have seen them as prisoners of war towards the end of the Empire). So he aligns extra hard with the Empire.

On a deeper, more subconscious level he’d lack the insight to get into, he probably hate Leia Organa for her role in Alderaans destruction. For her being strong enough to stop the Empire but not save her people (his people, to an extent). For her not being able to stop whatever suffering his mother was (or maybe worse, is still being) subjected to. Hux wants Leia and the New Republic to suffer as much as he’s seen others in his boat suffer. Because Leia is a Nobel who escaped the worst of the war but is the visible link between the Death Star and Alderaan. Yet she escaped starvation. Years of abuse. Losing absolutely everyone (the originals do end on a happy note). And it isn’t fair. Any suffering Armitage Hux causes would be justified in his own mind as an equalization of the horrors he and others have been through.

Also, betraying the First Order because you see an opportunity to reconcile your traumas and complex identity, and that others deserve that as well feels a bit more narratively fulfilling than spite.

#armitage hux #general hux #star wars #my massive thread covered cork board #arkanis #alderaan

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deebris · 1 year ago

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Guilty

Satoru Gojo x wife reader

Synopsis: Your husband never put a drop of alcohol in his mouth, and that was one of the things that made you give him a chance in the past due to family traumas that you carried because of it. But after years of relationship, one day he just surprises you by coming home late at night and out of his mind.

Warnings: anxiety; guilt issues; trauma with alcohol; harassment; some swearing; violence; anguish; Gojo's behavior is disgusting; Nanami is a friend.

Word count: 4.2k

I have to say that I really like angsty scenarios with couples. Don't judge me.

The clock on the living room shelf showed that it was already midnight. You stared at the slowly moving hands of the clock for a few seconds, and this only fueled your anguish. You asked yourself where the hell your husband was, so you pulled the thin blanket you brought to wrap yourself even tighter while you waited for him on the couch.

The plate with dinner food that you kept for him on the table was already cold and the feeling of loneliness made you uncomfortable. It had been a little over an hour since you had sent some messages to Satoru's cell phone, but they were not even received. Intrusive thoughts began to surface, contemplating the scenarios that could have happened to him, and they were all the result of the intense worry you felt.

He never stayed out this late without warning, and as you got up to look out the front window in hopes of seeing him arriving, your cell phone screen lit up and the typical sound of notifications vibrated on the table next to the armchair.

"Good night. Sorry for the inconvenience. We sent Gojo home in a taxi, he was in no condition to return on his own. Please let me know when he arrives so we know everything is okay."

- Kento

The message was a little confusing for you. Nanami spoke in the plural in a part of the message and did not clarify what exactly had happened. It was as if he assumed you knew something beforehand, but obviously you were lost trying to understand between the lines.

Besides, you would never expect to receive a text from him at this time of night, even after years of being friends. You wanted to extend that chat and clear up all your doubts, but you remembered that Satoru was coming home and could do that, so you just thanked him politely.

As you made a mental reminder to text Nanami when Satoru was home, coincidentally, a car's headlights illuminated the windows of your house. Most of the lights in the rooms were off, as you didn’t want to attract the attention of the neighborhood so late with the lights on.

"He's home. Thanks again, dear."

You informed him as requested and left the device back in its previous place to wait for the man near the front door. You heard the car tires go away and someone take heavy steps on the wooden planks of the porch.

Totally against the Gojo clan, you and your husband have moved to a mid-sized property in one of the regions of Tokyo. Honestly, you don't know if you could bear spending your days next to the old men and the numerous servants controlling your routine.

The door opens and you notice him struggling to find the light switch in the room, so you walk over and turn on the light. When he finally managed to see what was around him, Satoru opened his eyes that were half closed a little and looked at you.

"Hey, my beautiful wife." His voice was heavy, as if he needed a lot of effort to speak properly. He looked tired, and didn't have his usual playful demeanor. You were irritated and noticed that he hadn't closed the door yet, so you had to move a little closer to where he was to reach the door and lock it, but Gojo took advantage to put his face in your neck.

It was at that moment that you smelled the alcohol coming from his mouth. And it wasn't just any smell, it was very intense. Disgusted by the drink you immediately pulled away.

Gojo didn't drink, and after finding out years ago why you hated it so much, he promised he would never touch a single drop of alcohol. He could never do that to you. So why did he smell so bad now? You didn't want to believe that your sweet, handsome husband had come home drunk. Immediately the dark memories of your childhood and adolescence emerged and you froze in place.

"Satoru, what is this?" You asked alteredly, no longer knowing if you felt anger, fear or worry. Or maybe you should feel a mix of everything.

"What do you mean?" He was beside himself, he didn't even seem to know where each room was. Did he even know he was home?

"You drank?!" It wasn't necessary to ask, but you still did. You decided to do something else to not stress yourself out even more and walked away from him. You were warming up the plate on the table, as you normally would on days when he gets home a little late because of work. Then a light bulb went off in your head. Did you spend hours worrying while he was partying, drinking and having fun until late at night? He didn't even warn you or give any kind of satisfaction, and you just didn't feel worse because you knew Nanami was with him.

"Where were you?!" you turned around, this time making your angry tone clear so he could notice your mood.

"In a bar." His response was direct and smooth. You would never dream that he would come home like this, and even more so that he would admit what he did so easily. Had he forgotten his promise or did he simply not care anymore?

"Why?" Your question seemed to have made Satoru reflect for a while, or maybe he just couldn't think straight when he was so drunk. He wasn't completely conscious, but he could understand some parts of things.

Why had he been drinking? He had already heard from many people that alcohol helped them forget their problems, that distorted senses would make people happier. Gojo just wanted to get rid of the Jujutsu world for a bit, he just wanted to pretend for a moment that he was an ordinary citizen, one of those people who never dreamed of what a curse was. But he wasn't able to formulate that answer for you right now.

"Ah, come on, my love. There's no need to worry so much." he tried to distract you, or perhaps distract himself from the regret. He didn't know exactly how he felt, because the anguish he had in his chest before stepping into that bar was still there, but accompanied by drunkenness. "It was just a few shots." he said as he left the living room and walked over to you in the integrated dining room. He analyzed your silhouette with blurred vision and his heartbeat quickened a little more, he just didn't understand why exactly. He still had the desire to forget something; he wanted to forget everything and the drink didn't help him at all. The only thing it managed to do was confuse him.

Gojo wanted to numb his mind, and he was trying to do that through his body. Forcing himself to feel different things through lust.

You were his safe haven, but why didn't he look for you this time like he normally did? He didn't want to throw the burden of his sorcerer life onto his wife, he tried to follow an alternative path, but it didn't work. He needed you, needed to deceive himself in your embrace. He wanted to imagine that his world revolved only around you and that there was no one else on the Earth. He needed your touch as a last resort to expel the mental torture in his mind caused by his work.

He tried to get close to your neck again and you rejected him like before. He was confused, why were you acting like that? You never refused his touch, why this reaction now?

"You should take a shower. Seriously, Toru." You called him by his nickname, trying to convince him to jump into the freezing water. Was he dirty? He wondered. Was that why? Satoru knew well your requirement to keep the house clean and street clothes away from the furniture, as well as the shoes that should remain at the entrance. But that was the least of his worries now. He just wanted you, he needed to have you.

"I just need a hug from you." He insisted again and wrapped his arms around your form. He wanted to beg you, if necessary he would kneel, but luckily for him, this time you didn't move away. Still drunk and with his head spinning, he put his nose in your hair and sucked in air. That wonderful smell of the new shampoo you bought brought comfort, making him travel through sweet memories when he realized it smelled like honey.

But after a while, he seemed to want something different. His touch no longer seemed innocent and Satoru began trailing kisses from your temple to your shoulders. He moved his arms from your back and began sliding them around your waist, feeling the curves of your ribs and hips.

"Stop, Satoru." You groaned at the disgusting smell coming from him. He was going to make you smelly and rub his saliva all over your body. You hated that smell, and he knew it. He knew that.

"Why are you being so mean?" He whimpered, and you weren't offended by his accusation, understanding he was stunned. And when you felt like that was enough, trying to free yourself from his grip, he's hands around you became firmer, trying to keep you closer to him.

"I told you to go take a shower, Satoru. Stop." He completely ignored you and started trying to lower the straps of your nightgown while he continuing to kiss the area of your neck and shoulders. The nightgown was light and would slide out easily, so you had to fight against his hands to stop him, but his grip was too strong. While you resisted his movements on the top of your clothing, one of his hands tried to lift the bottom up and expose your panties. Your body shivered with fear at the feel of his member, as your husband forced his hips into yours.

He couldn't think straight, wanting only to satisfy the intense desire to have you "Stop it!" it was too much for you. Bad memories were already flooding your mind since you found out he had been drinking, and now your husband was behaving like a maniac. "I told you to stop it, Gojo!" You screamed as you reached your limit, and unable to bear the touch any longer, you abruptly pulled away from him, ripping one of the straps of your clothes in the process as he wouldn't let go at all. You picked up the plate of cold food from the table and threw it at his head in a desperate attempt to stop him.

The object hit Satoru's head intact and only broke as soon as it fell to the ground, shattering into shards and scattering pieces of rice and vegetables everywhere. You hadn't even noticed the tears running down your face before, your legs were wobbly from nervousness and you didn't pay much attention to Gojo curled up on the floor trying to contain the pain of the blow. You desperately ran to get your cell phone and stared at Nanami's profile in the list of recent conversations, deciding to call him in fear that Satoru would try something again.

Climbing the stairs in terror, you locked the door to your shared room, waiting hopefully for him to answer. It was only after 5 beeps that you heard Kento's voice.

"Hello?" He called your name and tensed as he heard some of your sobs over the line. You didn't say anything for a while, embarrassed and thinking about what you would say. "Everything is fine?"

You shook your head no, but then remembered that he couldn't see you. "N-no." Your voice cracked and you tried to wipe away the tears to compose yourself. You didn't want to admit that you were scared of your husband, but you also didn't want to face him alone right now.

Patiently your friend waited while you remained silent. He was worried, but he couldn't help unless you spoke. Meanwhile, your intrusive thoughts had returned. The anxiety inside your chest began to work intensely, and you couldn't stop asking: wasn't your attitude exaggerated? Weren't you making a storm in a teacup? Was it really necessary to have called Nanami?

"Do you want me to go there?" After a long time he spoke again waking you up. He felt that something was very wrong.

"Please." You cried out, he felt it in your tone. So without wasting any more time, he ended the call to come to you.

After minutes of driving, he arrived at the residence and knocked on the front door. After a long time, he realized that no one would come to answer, so he tested the handle and the door was open. He noticed the tense atmosphere and as he entered the house a little further and then he saw his white-haired friend sitting on the floor.

Gojo looked distressed, his hands angrily gripping clumps of hair as his back rested against the counter doors. Observing a little more, he noticed the dirty floor with shards of broken glass scattered around. The pieces reached distant places, indicating that the fall had a great impact.

"Were you the one who did this?" He asked bluntly, wishing in his heart that the two of you were okay, that everything was just an accident. It wasn't necessary to be very smart to notice that you had been arguing.

Gojo directed a pointed look at the blonde next to him, looking much more sober than the last time they had seen each other. "No." Gojo stated and then thought some more about what had happened. He replayed in his head you throwing the plate to defend yourself, from him. "Yes..."

"Where is she?" Gojo didn't like his friend's tone. It made him feel a thousand times worse, like a monster. Had you called him here? Were you really that scared of him? "I believe upstairs." He responded bitterly, the words clumping in his throat. Gojo didn't even have the courage to look for you to apologize, still not believing in his own behavior. The slam of the plate seemed to have broken some kind of spell, and he was more rational now.

Nanami ignored her friend and went upstairs and called out to you in the hallway. He didn't get a response, but decided to head to the most obvious option, your room. He knew a good part of your house, having been insistently invited by Gojo many times in the past. Hearing a muffled cries, he knocked on the wood.

"It's me. Kento." he heard your hurried footsteps and a key turning in the door, then you appeared. He noticed your disheveled state. You were a mess, with red eyes and trembling lips. He didn't want to pay any more attention to you than necessary, briefly noticing your nightdress being a little too intimate. He ignored that part and focused on your face, genuinely concerned.

"Thank you for coming." You hugged him and he didn't quite know how to return the gesture, but you didn't mind, because you knew it was just his way. You left the door open and invited him in for a bit.

As you went to sit on the bed again, Nanami saw a wool coat resting on a chair and gently picked up the piece. He walked over to your bed and positioned himself in front of you. He bent down to the same height as you and respectfully slid the slightly too big coat off your shoulders. He allowed you to grab the piece to cover the larger neckline created by the dropped strap, adjusting it in the best possible way. Then you noticed that the fabric wasn't big enough to cover your thighs and with one hand you stretched the hem of the nightgown to hide as much of that area as possible, feeling stupid when you finally became aware of how indecent you were.

"I'm sorry, I didn't notice." You whispered embarrassed.

"Do you want to tell me what happened?" He ignored your apology, bringing the focus of the conversation to what really matters. You thought for a while, still not knowing how to handle the question.

"Did you see him down there?" You were suddenly curious to know how your husband had reacted after you left. Nanami nodded after your question. "And how was he?"

"Shaken up." His response made you think. You had done this to him, maybe it was just your imagination. Satoru was a caring husband, he was just trying to be affectionate with you, wasn't he? Some thicker tears began to leak from your eyes again and you immediately wiped them away with your hands.

"I-I don't really know-" you started to speak to answer the question he had asked, but stopped yourself, pondering whether you should really tell him "I don't really know what happened. I could have imagined things, I haven't certainty."

To say Nanami was confused was an understatement. Imagined things?

"You don't have to tell me if you don't want to, I understand that this is your private life." His words were captivating. You really felt like telling him, but the inner fear that you were accusing your husband of something he might not have done, that you might have just misinterpreted, gnawed at your mind.

"He arrived drunk. I don't know why he arrived like that, he never drinks. You know that." You stared at the open door next to you, remembering that Satoru was still around at home. Understanding what was bothering you, the man asked if he could close the door and you consented.

"What else?" He encouraged you to continue.

"I hate alcohol, Kento. He knows that." You threw a strand of hair that insisted on falling behind your ear on your face and tried to steady your voice to continue "So he got a little clingy... then he came at me a-and Satoru started to touch me, then I asked him to stop, but he didn't seemed to be himself-"

Nanami tensed at your words. Had the broken man below really dared to do this? He would never be able to imagine his longtime friend acting like that, so it took him a while to digest what you said. But when he remembered the state of your nightgown, some things started to turn in his head. Suddenly the Nanami's aura became dark and you opened your eyes wide, fearing that you had said something really stupid.

"I know Satoru isn't that kind of man, Kento..." you desperately tried to explain yourself "Like I said, I may have imagined things."

"I believe in you." he tried to stop your rapid thoughts and stared at you in silence, still trying to process what Gojo had done. You were obviously distraught and creating scenarios in your head to mitigate the facts. He finally understood why you were so scared, why you had locked yourself in the room, and that reaction from Gojo... it would be hard not to believe what you said after realizing all that.

"Did he hurt you?" The question made you blink your eyes frantically, truthfully denying such a question.

"No! He would never do that!" You said with a hint of hesitation, wondering what would have happened if you hadn't been able to hit Satoru moments ago "He would never do that..." you repeated the last sentence in a whisper, trying to convince yourself more than the man in your front.

Kento remembered the plate thrown on the floor and Gojo's response when he had asked if the white-haired man had thrown it on the floor. No and yes. He assumed you threw the plate to defend yourself and finally he understood the meaning of the Gojo's ambiguous answer.

"But he is in perfect physical condition." Nanami eased your worries, figuring you would be worried about this.

The two of you spent long seconds in silence, and while Nanami thought of a way to help you, your thoughts were solely focused on the anxiety growing in the chest, trying to drown out the bad feeling and negative thinking.

"Do you want me to take him with me?" Nanami suggested and you understood what he meant. He was going to keep Gojo away from you tonight, take him with him somewhere, maybe his own home. You considered whether this would be the best option, but you doubt that you would be able to stay close to your husband for now.

"Do you think this is the best idea?" You questioned him shyly.

"I can spend the night here too. I can sleep downstairs with Gojo." Kento honestly didn't know what the correct way to react to this was. The situation took him completely by surprise and his mind was restless.

You thought for a moment and tried to imagine yourself with Satoru sleeping downstairs. You found the idea uncomfortable and the realization made you want to burst into tears even more. Your lips trembled once more and then you began to feel a sudden anger.

It's always the damn drink. It's always its fault! If it didn't exist, this would never have happened. You hated alcohol and everything related to it with all your being. You wanted to break every bottle of that unfortunate liquid.

You loved your husband too much to hate him even now. You would be angry at him at times, but you would never be able to blame him openly, denying it to yourself. So you deflect the blame onto a phantom enemy. The alcohol.

Your train of thought was interrupted when you heard Kento calling yout name once again. "I'm sorry, I thought too much."

"I think I'd better take him away tonight." He suggested seeing your inability to make a decision now. "Will you be okay alone? Do you want me to ask someone to stay with you?"

You didn't want to include anyone else in your problems and so you looked at the bedside clock noticing that it was already close to 1 am. "Yes. I'll be fine." Your voice was low and distant.

"Are you sure? You don't want me to call Megumi or someone else?" Kento knew your relationship with the boy well, having heard him call you mother in secret many times, but the idea seemed scary to you. Megumi never managed to find out what happened tonight, he would hate Gojo.

"Please, leave this story just between us" you asked swallowing hard

"If you need anything, just call me again." Your friend decided not to go against your decision and got up from his crouched position to go get Gojo. Before disappearing down the hall, he looked at you one last time. Your gaze was fixed on a random spot in the room and he let out a disappointed sigh. Against his will, Nanami walked again and went down the stairs.

"Let's go." he announced rudely as he met the eyes of the sorcerer already in the room. Gojo hasn't taken his eyes off the blonde's figure since his feet appeared in his field of vision at the top of the stairs. He was still sitting by the counter, replaying over and over the memories of you fighting him and torturing yourself for being an asshole.

"Was she the one who told me to leave?" Satoru's voice had a defeated tone.

"Not exactly." once again, Gojo hated the way Nanami spoke to him. Depraved, that's how the man sitting on the floor felt.

Still under the influence of alcohol, he needed help to get up. His head hurt like never before and everything started spinning. It took a lot of strength to lift him, as his body insisted on remaining on the ground, but Nanami tried his best to get him into the passenger seat of the car.

The entire way Gojo remained silent, looking out the window and both refusing to look at each other. Gojo seemed to have traveled in time when he noticed that he was suddenly under a shower. He didn't remember how he got out of the car, and somehow, he now finds himself in a bathroom with his clothes soaked. Nanami had no mercy and threw him under the freezing water as soon as they arrived, already fed up with the weakened state of the person next to him.

And then, Kento heard sobbing. Unlike those of the woman he spoke to a short time ago, these were more discreet and seemed to refuse to make too much noise. This was the cry of a man who didn't want to cry.

He just watched from a little distance as Gojo's shoulders swayed up and down. In an outburst of anger, he knocked over all the hygiene products hanging inside the shower and kicked the glass door hard. By a miracle, it didn't break, but made a powerful sound echo around the place. Nanami knew that there was a lot going on in his head right now, what should have been a work problem had consequences for your marriage, and very serious consequences.

"She's going to hate me, Nanami." Here it was. The most powerful sorcerer in the world crying like a child. He expelled the words in a distressing manner and the blonde finally felt a little sorry for him since they had left the house.

"No, she won't." Kento knew you, and witnessed the beginning of your relationship. Maybe it would be good to get away for a bit while your husband had so many problems with the life of a sorcerer. Maybe you two need to spend time alone, like some couples do, until things in the jujutsu world calm down and Gojo's temper returns to normal.

After a long pause, he was supposed to say something else. His friend was already quite upset, but Nanami was still outraged by Satoru's actions. Looking at his own reflection in the tile, he uttered the words, "But if you're not sorry for this, Gojo, or if you dare touch her like that again, I won't forgive you."

#imagine #x reader #anime imagines #anime #jujustu kaisen #jujutsu gojo #jujustsu kaisen x reader #gojo satoru #gojou satoru x reader #gojo x reader #jjk gojo #nanami x reader #jjk #angst #jujutsu kaisen satoru #gojo satoru x reader #gojo satoru x you #gojo satoru x y/n #anime x reader

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suddencolds · 1 year ago

Text

The Worst Timing | [1/?]

hello!! I've been wanting to write a longer h/c fic for awhile. This is the exposition/first installment to that (4.8k words).

this is an OC fic - here is a list of everything I've written for these two!

Summary: Yves invites Vincent to a wedding, in France, where the rest of his family will be in attendance. It's a very important wedding, so he's definitely not going to let anything—much less the flu—ruin it. (ft. fake dating, an international trip, downplaying illness, sharing a hotel room)

—

“A wedding,” Vincent repeats.

“Yes,” Yves says. “A wedding.”

It’s his cousin Aimee’s wedding—she’s four years older than he is. Back when he’d gone with his family back to France over the summers, she’d been one of the people he’d grown quickly to look up to—someone who knew the ins and outs, it seemed, to every stage of life he was in the process of stumbling through.

Yves has always been used to being looked up to—one of the natural consequences, perhaps, of being the eldest in his immediate family—and he likes to think that he’s good at giving off the impression that he has things figured out. But he’d grown close to Aimee at their family reunions precisely because she was everything he tried to be: strong-willed and resilient, self-sufficient even in the face of hardship.

Aimee’s getting married to Genevieve—someone who Yves has only met a couple times, but who manages to be one of the sweetest people he’s ever met. All in all, it’s a wedding he wouldn’t miss under any circumstances.

Leon, his brother, and Victoire, his sister, will be there, along with Aimee’s friends and the rest of his extended family. The problem is that Leon keeps in touch with Mikhail. Mikhail let slip that Yves has been seeing Vincent. Leon told Victoire, who told Aimee. And now Aimee is offering to pay for Vincent’s plane ticket to their wedding in France in the spring—a bit of a last minute arrangement, but she’d sounded so excited at the prospect that Yves was finally seeing someone new (“I’d love to meet him,” she’d said over the phone, “would it be too much to ask him to take a couple days off work? Oh my gosh, please give me his contact details, I’ll send him an invitation,” and she’d sounded so excited about it that he hadn’t had it in him to turn her down).

“It’s very last minute,” he says, “but my cousin’s getting married, and she really wants to meet you. It’ll be some time in early March, in Provence. She says she’ll pay for your flight, if you want to go, but you’d probably have to take a couple days off.”

“Oh,” Vincent says, blinking at him. “And you want me to be there?”

“Of course I do,” Yves says. “I think it’s more a question of whether you want to be there.”

Vincent looks back at him, his expression carefully blank. “Are you sure you want to introduce me to your family? That doesn’t seem like the kind of thing that you’d take lightly.”

“They want to meet you,” Yves says. “And I wouldn’t mind introducing you. I think they would really like you.”

“It would be a waste of your time,” Vincent says, quietly, “to introduce me as someone you’re serious about if we’re just planning to break things off.”

Yves is well aware of the fact. This arrangement with Vincent—the trust he places in Vincent; the practiced familiarity, the feigned intimacy—has an expiration date. The fact that he doesn’t know when the expiration date is doesn’t change the fact that it will, inevitably, end—when Erika gets the point, or fades from Yves’s life entirely; when Vincent finds someone he considers worthy of pursuing in actuality; when either of them become interested in dating again. Whatever it is that ends up ending things, Yves knows: what he has with Vincent right now is strictly temporary.

Perhaps it would be disingenuous to lie to his family about who exactly Vincent is to him. But then again, Yves thinks it isn’t much worse than any other relationship, with all of its ups and downs, all its hopes and uncertainties. It’s not like he can ever guarantee that a relationship is certain to work out, no matter how serious he feels about it in the moment. So is there really any harm to introducing Vincent as his current partner—as someone he feels certain about now, but maybe not always—and to leave it at that?

“It’s not really going to be my day, in the first place,” Yves says. “My relationship status is more of a conversation starter than anything. And even if you go by the timeline we told Erika, we haven’t even been together for a year. I don’t think my family will think much of it other than, like, a small and noncommittal window into what I’ve been up to. So it’s really up to you.”

“I think it would be fun,” Vincent says, “though only if you’re sure about having me there.”

“Great. I’m sure,” Yves says. “Everyone will love you.” He does think it’s true. Something about Vincent tends to have that effect, he thinks.

—

The fact that he and Vincent are traveling together is not exactly a secret.

Vincent agrees it’s best shared on a need-to-know basis—they won’t be the ones to bring it up, but if someone asks about it, they’ll answer honestly. It would be more work, Yves thinks, to have to coordinate lies about this.

But he runs into trouble not even two weeks later.

“So you and Vincent are taking the week off,” Cara says to him carefully, over lunch.

“Yes,” Yves says.

“Any plans?”

“I’m actually flying to France,” Yves tells her, uncertain about whether or not he should mention Vincent’s involvement—if Vincent has talked to Cara about this already, there’s no point in hiding anything, but he should be careful with the information he discloses otherwise. “One of my cousins is getting married there.”

“Oh,” Cara says, all too knowingly. “What a coincidence. Vincent told me he’s also planning on going to France.”

“I… heard,” Yves says, slowly. “He’s told me as much.”

“I didn’t realize France was such a popular tourist destination for march,” Cara says, smiling at him. “I thought most people went over the summer.”

“You know what they say,” Yves says. “France’s beauty knows no seasons.”

“You should ask Vincent which part of France he’s visiting,” Cara says, with a smirk. “Maybe you guys can book a hotel together.”

Yves is positive he’s being laughed at. “It’s the third largest country in Europe,” he says. “I’m sure the chance of us ending up in the same region is statistically very low.”

“I think Cara knows we’re fake dating,” he laments to Vincent later, in the break room. “I mean, the dating part, not the fake part.”

Vincent blinks at him. “Did you tell her?”

“No,” Yves says. He doesn’t think they’ve been that obvious about it. “I just told her I was going to France. She made some undue assumptions.”

“Oh,” Vincent says. “I told her I was attending a wedding there.”

An impromptu trip to France, over the same week at the tail end of busy season, to attend a wedding. Separately. Yves is starting to understand where Cara's suspicions might’ve come from.

“That would do it,” he says.

Perhaps they really need to coordinate what a need-to-know basis means. Cara is, thankfully, not the type of person to gossip, from what Yves has gathered, but if their coworkers know, that could complicate things. “I don’t think she’ll say anything,” he says. “But I’m sorry. I didn’t think she’d assume.”

Vincent seems to consider this. “It’s fine,” he says. “Though it might prove troublesome when we decide to end things.”

“We can figure that out when it happens,” Yves says.

At some point in the foreseeable future, everything will go back to how it’s always been. Yves had been fine on his own for a long time before he’d met Erika. He’s sure he’ll be prepared for it when it happens.

—

The entire drive to the airport feels surreal.

Mikhail drives them. They leave at the crack of dawn—4am, on the dot. Victoire’s in the passenger seat, dozing off, and Leon, Vincent, and Yves are crammed into the backseat.

Yves sits in the middle—there’s not much leg room to go around in the first place, but he tries to take up as little space as possible, mostly for Vincent’s sake. He and Leon have been crammed into far smaller cars on far longer road trips.

Leon says, “This is the earliest in the morning I’ve ever third wheeled.”

Victoire, who has her eyes shut, says, “It’s very nice to meet you, Vincent.”

“Likewise,” Vincent says.

“Yves has told us all about you,” Leon says.

“Oh,” Vincent says, blinking. “What has he said about me?”

“Mostly that you’re super hot,” Leon says. Yves, who is in a perfect position to elbow him, elbows him for that.

“You make me sound so shallow,” Yves says.

“But also that you’re really good at your job,” Leon continues, patting Yves on the leg. “Did you know Yves likes people who he’s slightly intimidated by?”

“I never said that,” Yves says.

“It’s pretty obvious,” Mikhail says.

“You guys are conspiring against me,” Yves says, and Vincent laughs.

Leon launches into a series of questions—about how they met, about who asked who out first, about what it’s like at work, about what kinds of things Vincent does for fun.

“No wonder Yves is totally whipped,” Leon says, after Vincent finishes telling a story about how he’d given a presentation at a conference in place of his then-boss, who had—due to unforeseen flight delays—found out last minute that she wouldn’t have been able to make it on time. Yves hasn’t heard this story before, but it doesn’t surprise him that Vincent would be able to pull that sort of thing off, even with such paralyzingly short notice. “You’re exactly his type.”

Just great. If anyone could dig a nice, fitting grave for him over the span of one conversation, Yves thinks, it would be younger brother.

“I can’t believe he hasn’t invited you over for dinner yet,” Victoire says, her eyes still closed. How much of this conversation she’s actually been awake for, Yves can’t say.

She makes Yves promise that, after their trip to France, Vincent will be over for dinner. (“Sure,” Vincent says. “Just tell me the date in advance. I’ll clear my schedule.” Yves will have to apologize to him after this—for some reason, Vincent has an uncanny talent for ending up invited to half the things Yves is personally involved in.)

Yves is awake enough to hold a conversation, but he finds himself yawning mid-sentence on more than a few occasions. Vincent doesn’t so much as yawn at all over the entirety of the car ride. Yves has no idea if he’s always up this early, or if he’s just naturally immune to tiredness—another signature of his good genetics, next to the fact that he looks like he’s just stepped out of a photoshoot, or the fact that he manages to look good in everything he wears. Some people just win the genetic lottery, Yves supposes.

For some reason, he finds he feels a little more tired than usual. Waking up early is never easy, but usually he’d be distinctly more alert by now. There’s a strange, uncharacteristic heaviness to his limbs—it’s the kind of grogginess he only experiences when he hasn’t been getting enough sleep for awhile.

It’s fine. They have an eight hour flight ahead of them—they’ll be flying into Marseille, and then being driven up to Provence, where the wedding will be taking place. He can catch up on sleep over the flight.

As they’re unloading the suitcases from the back trunk, Vincent says, “Your family’s nice.”

Yves laughs. “I’m relieved they haven’t scared you off yet. Sorry for the… well, interrogation, by the way.”

“I can tell you’re close to them,” Vincent says, a little more quietly.

When Yves looks over, something about Vincent’s smile looks almost wistful. Yves wonders, briefly, how well Vincent has kept up with his own family. If he’d ever been packed into the backseat of a small car, back when he’d lived in Korea; if over some long road trip, he’d ever had to come up with increasingly inventive ways to pass the time. If his relatives ever teased him, then, about the crushes he’d had when he was younger, or anything else. If the ocean that was suddenly between them came with another, less tangible kind of distance, the kind that even phone calls and international flights can never quite bridge.

Yves doesn’t know. He doesn’t even know how he’d go about asking if he wanted to know. How is it that sometimes, he feels like he knows so much about Vincent, but other times, he feels like he knows almost nothing at all?

—

Aimee has booked him a seat next to Vincent.

They’re a few rows away from the others—I wanted to seat everyone together, Aimee had texted him a few weeks back, but when I was booking Vincent’s ticket, the seats up front were all sold out, so I just moved you so you’d be sitting next to him.

Now, he watches as Vincent pushes his briefcase gingerly into the overhead compartment.

“You must not be new to flying,” he says.

Vincent nods. “I’m not.”

“Eight more hours,” Yves says, taking the middle seat so that Vincent doesn’t have to. “It’ll be over in no time, especially if you take a nap.”

“I have some work to get done,” Vincent says. “Only after the plane takes off, though.”

Right—no electronics larger than a cell phone until they’re 30,000 feet in the air. “I thought this was supposed to be your week off.”

“It is,” Vincent says. “I just want to make sure everything’s still in one piece by the time I get back.”

Yves has never quite been comfortable on planes. It’s not that he’s afraid of flying, or that the turbulence bothers him—it’s more just the cramped space, the noise, the anticipation, the discomfort—all of it compounds. It’s usually difficult to get to sleep, but he’s so tired right now that maybe this flight will be an exception.

There’s just one problem: whoever is in charge of the air conditioning in the airplane cabin really hates him. Compared to Provence, New York’s climate is generally more extreme—colder in the winters, hotter in the summers—so all he has on him right now is a thin jacket. It’d be perfectly reasonable attire in most situations, except for the fact that this airplane in particular is unusually frigid. It’s definitely cold enough to be distinctly uncomfortable, especially considering that he’s just sitting in place. Yves crosses his arms, suppressing a shiver.

“Do you think Aimee will be convinced?” Vincent asks.

“Convinced?”

“That we’re together.”

“I’m sure she has better things to do than play detective over the state of my relationships,” Yves says, with a laugh. “You don’t have to worry about that.”

“It’s why you invited me,” Vincent says, “is it not?”

“Pardon?”

“To show the rest of your family that you’re not still hung up over Erika.”

“I invited you for a lot of reasons,” Yves says. “For one, you’re good company.”

“So are all your friends.”

“I thought we could both use a week off,” Yves adds. “It’s France, in the springtime. What could be better?”

Vincent says, “I need you to tell me what to do.”

“What?”

“Your cousin paid for my flight,” he lists, counting off his fingers. “Your family is paying for the hotel. Your best friend drove me to the airport.” He says these things as if he’s listing off all the ways in which he’s indebted to them. “It’d be easiest for both of us if you told me how to make a good impression. That’s what I’m here for, right?”

Yves blinks. “I don’t think you’d need my help to make a good impression.”

“You could’ve taken anyone with you, but you’re taking me,” Vincent presses. “There has to be something you need me for.”

If there was nothing, you wouldn’t have invited me. The sentiment hangs between them, unspoken. But Yves can see it in Vincent’s expression.

“My favorite cousin is getting married,” Yves says, fervently. “To her fiancee—who is also super cool, by the way. My whole family is going to be there. Do you think I’d choose to endure an eight hour plane ride sitting next to someone I didn’t like?”

“Maybe,” Vincent says.

Yves shakes his head. “It’s true that my family wants to meet you. But if I didn’t want you to come to France with me, I could’ve come up with an excuse.”

He twists around in his seat so that he’s facing Vincent directly. Narrowly resists the urge to reach out and grab Vincent’s hand. “I like spending time with you. I wouldn’t have invited you if I didn’t. You don’t have to do anything out of the ordinary—if you have fun on this trip, that’s more than enough.”

Vincent stares back at him, his eyes wide.

Yves has a feeling he’s said too much. It isn’t Vincent’s fault for assuming this is all just for show, considering everything that’s come before. Part of it is, but another part of him just really wants Vincent to have fun—to take in the sights at the gorgeous venue Aimee’s sent him pictures of, to have a week off in one of the most picturesque countrysides in the world (Yves may be slightly biased, but still) and not have to think too hard about impressing everyone.

“Is that… okay with you?” Yves asks.

“Yes,” Vincent says. “It’s just unexpected.”

“Which part?”

“All of it.”

“Oh. Well. I’m sorry if I misled you, or anything.”

“You didn’t.” This time, Vincent really does smile—a sly, quicksilver thing. “For the record, I am very excited to go to your cousin’s wedding.”

“Thank god,” Yves says. “That’s good. I was beginning to think I was holding you hostage.”

He leans back into his seat, suppressing another shiver. Something about the changing pressure in the airplane cabin is making his head start to ache. It’s probably the elevation. Perhaps he should try to sleep just so that he doesn’t have to sit for eight hours with a headache brewing.

He shuts his eyes and tries. It’s no use. He’s tired, and the cabin is quiet enough, but it’s too cold to get to sleep—it feels impossible to get comfortable like this.

So he picks up a novel he’d been meaning to get to—something suspenseful, to offset the monotony of the flight.

When the seatbelt sign flickers off, Vincent unclips his seatbelt so that he can retrieve his briefcase from one of the overhead compartments, and spends the next half hour paging through multiple documents and leaving notes in the margins at a dizzying pace. Yves slinks down lower into his seat, trying hard not to shiver.

“Is it just me, or is it kind of cold in here?”

Vincent frowns at him in a concerned way that seems to suggest that it really is just him. Then again, Vincent is unfazed by New York’s cold winters, so Yves isn’t sure he’s the best point of reference.

“Do you need my jacket?” he asks.

“No,” Yves says quickly. “It’s not that bad.”

“Okay,” Vincent says. “If you’re certain.”

He turns his attention back to the screen, and Yves resigns himself to reading—or, more accurately, trying and failing to read. It’s mercilessly cold, and his head hurts enough to make focusing on any one thing an uncomfortable task. He gets through another couple chapters, finds himself rereading the same passage over and over again, and—finally, defeated—dog-ears the page and slides the book into the pocket attached to the seat in front of him.

The next time the flight attendants come around, Vincent says something to one of them Yves can’t quite make out. Yves asks for orange juice—it’s not supposed to be symbolic, or anything, but on the off-chance that this headache ends up being a precursor to something more unpleasant, he thinks it might be wise.

The flight attendant pours him the orange juice he’s asked for—no ice (right now, something ice cold is the last thing he needs)—and sets it down on the tray table in front of him. Yves stares down at it, blinking. He hasn’t eaten all day, but strangely, he doesn’t have much of an appetite.

He doesn’t register the flight attendant from before—the one Vincent talked to—is back until he hears Vincent’s quiet “thanks” to his left.

Something brushes against his arm.

He looks up. It’s one of those travel blankets they sometimes carry, neatly folded, though this flight hadn’t given them out to everyone at the start. They must be reserved—given only upon request, maybe.

“You said you were cold,” Vincent—who’s holding out the blanket for him—says, by way of explanation.

Yves blinks at him. He’s about to reassure Vincent, instinctively, that it’s not that cold—that he would’ve been fine without the blanket, that Vincent didn’t have to go out of his way to ask for one.

But his head hurts. He hasn’t been warm all flight. To say that the blanket is a relief would be a massive understatement.

“Thanks,” he says, taking it. “This is perfect. I won’t be cold with this.”

He ends up wrapping the blanket around his shoulders, pulling it tightly around him—like a cloak, or like the jacket that he might have brought with him if he’d had the foresight to anticipate feeling this cold on a commercial flight.

It’s nice. He’s still a little cold, with the blanket, but it’s enough to keep him from openly shivering.

He should really try to get some sleep, he thinks. It’s going to be evening in France when they land. A seat away from him, the window shutters are pulled up, but he can see, from the crevices around the window, that it’s light out.

“I’m going to try to nap,” he tells Vincent. “But wake me up if I need anything—elbow me if you have to. I’m not usually a heavy sleeper.”

“Okay,” Vincent says. “I’ll try not to wake you.”

“You can wake me whenever,” Yves says, muffling a yawn into his hand. “Don’t work too hard.”

Vincent smiles at him, the kind of smile that implies he thinks he’s working exactly as hard as he should be. “No promises.”

It’s not easy to get to sleep, despite his exhaustion. He lays there for a while, his eyes shut—it’s certainly warmer with the blanket, but for some reason, he feels strangely restless. Maybe it’s the adrenaline of being here, with his family, with Vincent—on the way to see one of the most important people in his life get married. Maybe it’s the cup of black coffee he’d downed this morning to be awake enough to help Mikhail navigate and, subsequently, awake enough to actually be useful at the airport.

In the end, he falls asleep to the static hum of the aircraft, to the sound of Vincent hammering away at his keyboard next to him, incessant and comforting.

—

Yves wakes to someone tapping him on the shoulder.

“Sorry,” he says. “I’m up.”

“A ‘light sleeper,’ you said,” Vincent says. “We just landed.”

Yves says, “I’m wide awake.” The yawn that he hides behind one hand is apparently not subtle enough, because when Vincent looks away from him in favor of staring straight ahead, it looks like he’s trying not to laugh.

Vincent’s stowed away his laptop already—Yves hopes that’s a sign that he’s done with work for the duration of this trip, but more likely he just had to put it away for landing.

“How was the flight for you?” Yves says.

Vincent looks at him. “Uneventful,” he says, at last.

“Not enthralled by all the financial records you had to go through?”

“They were very enthralling. How was your nap?”

“Good,” Yves says, even though he doesn’t feel particularly rested. He’s just groggy, probably, and the headache is just as bad as it was, if not worse. He’s sure once he gets off the plane and gets some fresh air, he’ll feel much better. “I probably needed it.” His breath hitches, unexpectedly, he turns to the side, raising his arm to his face to shield the oncoming—

“hH-’IZscHH’iew!”

The sneeze is loud, embarrassingly, and it scrapes unpleasantly against his throat, which feels… off.

“Bless you,” Vincent says, frowning. He looks more concerned than he has any right to be.

Yves flashes Vincent a distracted smile. “Thanks.”

Everything—from the moment they step off the plane—is exhaustingly hectic.

The hotel in Provence is more than an hour away from the airport they’ve landed at. They have a bus to catch, which means that after they regroup with the others, it’s international customs, baggage claim, and then they’re headed, maneuvering multiple suitcases each, onto the bus. He sits next to Vincent, though on the aisle side, so that he can lean over and interject whenever Leon and Victoire say something that’s worth commenting on.

Other than that, he talks with Vincent, mostly—about Aimee, about how she’s been in his life for longer than he’s known how to write his name, back when his parents would take him back to France once or twice a year. (“She was practically an older sister to me,” he says, “except we never fought,” to which Vincent says, “You make it sound like not getting along is a requirement to be siblings,” to which Yves says, “It definitely is.”)

His parents flew into France yesterday, so they should be settled in already—they’ll catch up with them at the hotel tonight, if it’s not too late. He probably won’t see Aimee and Genevieve until tomorrow morning, at breakfast—and even then, that depends on how busy they are with the various wedding preparations Aimee’s been telling him about.

The roads nearing the hotel are uneven and winding. Halfway through the drive, Yves registers, faintly, that he isn’t really feeling any better from before. His head is still hurting from the flight, and when he swallows, he finds his throat feels perhaps the slightest bit sore.

He’s cold, too, in the sort of uncomfortable, persistent way that’s difficult to alleviate, even with extra layers or with a warm drink. He’s starting to suspect that maybe the airplane cabin hadn’t been the problem after all.

None of that is particularly visible to any of the others—that is, until he finds himself tensing up halfway through a sentence, burying his head into the crook of his elbow as his eyes squeeze shut—

“God, sorry, I— hh-! hHehh’iiZZSCHh’iiEW!”

“Bless you,” Vincent, Victoire, and Leon say to him, all at once.

“You’d better not be getting sick,” Leon says, turning to him, with the sort of tone that implies that he’s joking. “That would really be the worst timing.”

“I’m not,” Yves says, swallowing against the soreness in his throat. “I promise.” Or, perhaps more accurately—he can’t be.

It will be the perfect wedding, he thinks. Aimee has planned it out meticulously, and she’s one of the most thorough people he knows. The weather forecast says this week will be sunny and temperate. He’s here, in France. Tomorrow, he’ll be surrounded by his extended family, and in the afternoon he and Vincent will head off to the welcome party, and he’ll get to give Aimee the gifts he’s gotten for her and introduce Vincent to everyone formally. Everything will go as planned—the welcome party, the wedding rehearsal, the rehearsal dinner, and on Saturday, the wedding and the vows.

It will be perfect, because it has to be. Yves will be present, and attentive, and he’ll give the speech he has prepared at Aimee’s wedding, and they’ll all remember this week fondly. Even considering the small, almost negligible chance that he’s coming down with something, there are more important things he has to worry about right now, which is to say: Yves is going to do this right.

He’s going to make sure of it.

[ Part 2 ]

#sneeze fic #snz fic #sneeze kink #snz kink #snz #i'm sorry if this exposition is like #comparatively uneventful 😭😭😭#this entire fic was written with the intent of giving people-pleaser yves the worst time possible #so i promise that is to come... in the future (if i have the time and bandwidth to write more and if people want to read more)#yvverse #my fic #fun fact - i used to refuse to write characters with anything worse than a cold (the flu included) just as principle #clearly that changed over the years haha

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tiredgraduate · 18 days ago

Text

You want my honest opinion on some of the election statistics & politics right now? I never, NEVER, like to comment on politics, but I'm tired of being quiet and holding this in. There is no one I can be honest with and talk to other than you lovely people on the internet.

I voted blue as a young white christian woman. I was born and raised in the heart of a red state. My parents were considered super conservative, even to other Christians and conservatives. My extended family is still that way, to the point where asking genuine questions about history and reason is seen and taken as offensive and treacherous to the American good. When I went to college, I was still a very right-wing minded person. Here's the thing: I naturally have a soft heart. I don't like being mean, and I don't appreciate other people being crappy for no good reason. My upbringing in the church and my relationship with Jesus Christ both in and out of the church has only strengthened that part of me.

So, in college, I encountered a number of classmates and fellow musicians that were of other ethnicities, members of the LGBTQ community, and so much more. I learned quickly to see them as my cohorts and friends, and that I had no grounds to judge them based on their life and struggles. As they say, and I take literally, hate the sin, love the sinner. I couldn't care less if you're black, white, gay, trans, struggling with drug addictions, addictions to anything like porn, social media, etc.

I struggle with some of that too, which gives me no ground to judge. As the Bible says, "He who is without sin, cast the first stone." I am no better than anyone else, and I am actively trying to make that evident in my life.

As I said before, my ultra conservative christian family didn't like this. Not one bit of it. I managed to befriend and be a safe place for a number of my fellow musicians, because I knew about their bad experiences with other christians and the church, a recent burn from the church on myself, and their mixed family backgrounds that made my being an older sister that much more important. So, naturally, I started to lean more left, and at the same time, away from the "church."

To say I left the church would be accurate. Christianity, less so. It has been a rough four years in finding my faith again. But in the midst of that, I learned about the world around me from the perspectives of both christian and non-christian. I didn't have a reason to be spiteful or hateful towards a specific demographic (unlike some of my family).

Then I graduated and moved to New York, and let me tell you - blue state living is where it's at. But in stepping away from something you've been immersed in your whole life, you then see the issues within. I noticed this with the church, then with my family, and then my hometown and state. There are some SERIOUS issues with all of them.

This TikTok explains a lot of what I think of the modern "church:" https://www.tiktok.com/@k.t.phillips21/video/7434922467652554027?_r=1&_t=8rGnfwwJxNP

The church condemns so many things, until it applies to them. The burn from the church in my life came from a previous pastor telling someone to do something behind all of our backs, and that led to my family collapsing in on itself and my brother attempting suicide seven times. All because one man thought he knew what should be the case in a situation, and didn't think to bring God into the matter.

For my family, it's the same type of thing. The allowance of certain things, while condemning the same things when others struggle. It's exhausting. So, when I moved to New York, I blocked numbers, deleted others, and had a serious talk with my immediate family about boundaries and what being 20+ hours away meant. I happen to have understanding parents and siblings after the events of three years ago. On the other hand, my extended family is messed up. Constant asking of "are you depressed" or "do you have a boyfriend yet," while not actually caring about the answer, or just blatantly ignoring the truth. Recently, I cut off almost all of one side of my extended family because of a wedding happening in March between a girl who is barely eighteen and a boy (he is NOT a man, he just happens to be my cousin) who is TWENTY SEVEN. The relationship was arranged, and they recently decided to move the wedding up by 4 months because, and I quote: "he(cousin) just couldn't wait 😉." Mind you, his last relationship, he kidnapped from one state under the guise of "meeting the family" but was actually bringing her to another state after dating for three weeks to marry her without her family's knowledge or consent. It's messed up.

My hometown and state? Oklahoma. I think that question answers itself. Considering that it was completely red on Tuesday, and is the top state of searches "can I change my vote."

Anyways - I am disappointed in a lot of people. So many things were on the line in this election, and the fact that people are just now educating themselves on what this means now that they've re-elected Trump is ridiculous.

If a felon cannot get a job in some areas or vote, why the hell should one become president? Second - why is said felon SO quiet after winning? Something is wrong.

To my fellow women who voted blue, I'm sorry for what we're going to see and what we're encountering just days after the election. To the LGBTQ people who see this, I'm sorry too. To all of you blue (and some red) friends, I am sorry. I'm sorry that 53% of white women voted against a reasonable choice, and voted for a literal felon, rapist, and just crappy dude. I'm sorry that all of us are having so much mixed emotion about what the next 4 years looks like while my family and many others are home celebrating the idea of cheaper groceries. I wish I could hug many of you, because it's crappy that we're united and meeting like this.

To the people who voted red - I'm sure you've heard this already, but I really hope you get what you asked for. I hope you get what you wanted. I hope it affects you directly. I hope you see what happens when you don't educate yourself until it's too late. I hope you see what happens when you only look out for yourself. I hope you see how un-loving and un-Christian some of you are acting.

For the little boys (you are NOT men in my eyes right now) that keep saying "your body, my choice" and are saying so many crappy things to the women in and out of your life because you feel empowered by one president-elect: I hope you eat your words. I hope you manage to get your head out of your butt and see what you're doing. I hope you realize you've shoved your head so far up your butt that it came out of your throat and that's why you're acting the way you are. I hope you have to eat your words and get everything you think you're going to get and more.

I am lucky to be considered "safe" in a blue state, but I am still so heartbroken over my friends who aren't considered safe and have to deal with this stuff head on. I wish things were different. If any of you happen to know me in real life, take this to heart. If you don't know me, know this anyway:

I am sorry for how people in America are acting right now. I am sorry that we have to live in a nation so broken and frustrating. In the middle of it all, you are loved, and I pray now that something good comes out of this; that we learn to love and be loved, we learn to be gracious and forgiving instead of angry and condemning. I pray we learn to be people over Americans, that them and us doesn't continue, and that we learn what the right thing is and how we are going to move forward. If you need someone to be an ear or a friend, I hope you find one. Whether that is someone in real life, someone on another site, someone here, or even myself.

You are not alone ❤️

#queue #election 2024 #us politics #politics #you are NOT alone

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familyabolisher · 1 year ago

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Apologies if you've answered this before, but I've been following you for a while and the way you approach literary analysis is so interesting, and your takes have made me reflect on and reconsider the way I approach a text and how to respond to it! So I wanted to ask: when you read other people's takes/analysis for a particular piece of media, how do you determine if it's good or not? And not in a way where you decide it's "good" in the sense that the person you're reading has uncovered the One True Interpretation you could get out of that piece of media, but in the sense where you feel like it was worth your time, and hit the spots that you're looking for in particular when it comes to media analysis.

I'm asking because I've taken to reading more media analysis and commentary online a lot more nowadays, and sometimes I'll read something I'm not quite satisfied with but can't exactly articulate why I feel that way. I never know if it's in the particular language used or in the length, or in the details, because frequently I find that at the end of my reading I don't even disagree with the take or its premise, which makes my dissatisfaction all the more confusing. So I do like hearing about how other people approach things to try and figure things out for myself, and I respect a lot of your positions, so. How do you do it?

Thank you! I feel like “good/bad” is a very broad framework to be using here; I wonder if it might be more helpful to come to conclusions about analytical work based on how useful you found it. There’s a lot of critical work that I consider to be completely useless to me, but that doesn’t necessarily make it ‘bad’ or even ‘wrong’; it’s just not doing what I want it to be doing. Some questions you might want to ask could include:

Is this elucidating? Does this explain what it purports to explain, does it answer the questions it wants to answer and/or pose new questions that weren’t immediately legible in the text? Has it developed an idea clearly? Has it given you some new angles from which you can think about the text? In short: did you get something from reading it?

Is the argument followed to its furthest possible conclusion? What I mean by this is like, media analysis is often a process of asking a lot of “why” questions: why is X like this? Why is this significant? Why X and not Y?—over and over until you run out of questions to ask. I think the big thing to watch out for here is whether or not a piece of analysis lays out its observations as though events, characterisation, relationships, etc., are phenomena emerging organically (as though it were “real life”) rather than being narrative choices made with intention (and some impetus towards figuring out what that intention is). Saying that X character is like Y is far less compelling than saying X character is like Y because Z when Z is an argument that extends beyond the boundaries of the narrative itself. Narratives are a series of deliberate choices; we want to know why those choices were made and whether we agree with them.

To give an example: let’s say we’re talking about the significance of Shiv’s pregnancy in the final episode of Succession. Following it through to its conclusion might look like this:

I start out by saying, “Tom being favoured over Kendall as CEO of Waystar is in part due to Shiv’s pregnancy reaffirming the Roy family bloodline, something that Roman establishes Kendall as being functionally incapable of doing.” The first question we should ask here is: why is reaffirming the bloodline significant?

From here we can say, well, we know it’s significant because Roman uses the word ‘bloodline’ to mark Tom/Shiv as favourable, and this tells us that there is a logic of eugenics running through Logan’s empire. This is good, but we’re still operating in wholly diegetic territory ie. the only terms we’re setting for our argument are those of describing conditions internal to the narrative. The next question we’re asking is: why are the Succession writers bringing this question of eugenics and bloodlines into play here?

From here, we can go in a bunch of different directions—for argument’s sake, we can think about Succession’s relationship to imperial/monarchic narratives of dynastic succession crises and how the show generates tension in part by transposing those narratives onto an American capitalist media empire in order to suggest that networks of capitalist hegemony and the means by which such a hegemony is sustained can be discursively linked back to such dynastic interplay. We might then point to eg. Caroline and the British aristocracy and this question of blood purity that Logan’s relationship with her + his discarding of Connor introduces; can we think about the British imperial aristocracy as a crutch on which American capitalism rests, or are we being asked to consider how these imperial superpowers are a) functionally interchangeable and b) mutually sustaining, or? We can look at the fact that Sophie Roy is brown and Iverson is implied to be autistic (and obviously the fact that neither is biologically related to Kendall and the suggestion that social ‘inferiority’ is therefore hereditary) to identify whose bloodline a practice of eugenics within hegemony seeks to retain and who it seeks to dispossess, and how this links back to the willingness on the part of the siblings to collude with (or even openly support) a fascist when it becomes in their best interest to do so. We can ask questions about reproduction of the bloodline as a means of reaping the rewards of hegemony (Shiv) or punishment within the borders of said hegemony for impotence and sexual deviance (Kendall and Roman). All of these lead us from arguments about the internal conditions of the Roy family towards conditions of the ruling class articulated through the family structure. All of this is compelling, but it begs the question of: why are we able to extrapolate all of these conclusions from the narrative configuration of the Roy family? Where in the text is it evinced that this kind of metonymic reading is coherent?

Finally, we link this back to Succession by understanding the Roy family as effectively metonymic for the ruling class as a united body (and why it’s effective for a family unit to take on such a metonymic role! What does this tell us about the relationship between the cluster of kinship relations we call the “family” and hegemony?) as is pretty transparently evinced throughout the show, and which is what gives meaning to this series of observations and allows us to extract an argument towards thematic significance out of what was initially just a set of observations about what was ‘happening’ on-screen.

I hope this is a clear example—I just went with it because most people on this website are at least passably fluent in Succession by now, lmao. The point is, you keep asking questions until you’ve followed the throughline through as far as it can be followed. In evaluating a piece of critical writing, you always want to be asking: why is this there? Why is this important? A weaker piece of critical writing will often avoid or else seem not to consider these sorts of questions. As a general rule of thumb, the more a work of critical writing seems to take for granted, the weaker it tends to be.

How well does the argument match the expectations you might have? Is this line of interrogation something that you’ve considered before, and what conclusions did you draw? Does the argument fall in line with your conclusions; does it challenge or develop them by introducing something you hadn’t considered, or do you think that your understanding identified something that the argument missed? If you were asked the question that the piece purports to respond to, how would you respond?

What are the blind spots of the argument? This is similar to the above, but is specifically concerned with asking what the piece might have missed or what assumptions might be limiting its scope. This means looking for the assumptions upon which the argument rests and trying to unpack and challenge them in order to understand how they took the form that they did. An example of this might be the kind of “female rage”/“teenage girl ferality” arguments you often see circling about Yellowjackets: what narrative does this idea of girls’ youthful ‘rage’ implicitly exonerated from harm contribute to? What do we do when we reify the idea of ‘teenage girlhood’ as a unique, impenetrable state that affords those who ‘experience’ it a uniquely elevated condition, or when we flatten these characters into the apparently equalised category of ‘teenage girl’? How do these arguments elide questions of race in Yellowjackets as regarding eg. Lottie or Taissa, and how can we follow them through to think about blind spots not only in the argument but in the show itself? No argument can feasibly encompass every possible nuance and perspective that one could bring to a text, obviously, but a stronger piece of critical writing will try to get into these underlying assumptions with depth and thoughtfulness and try to put some work into showing why they came to the conclusions that they came to; again, it’s about what gets taken for granted, what the writer presumes can go unspoken, and whether we ought to drag it to the surface and take a better look at it.

How well is the argument substantiated? Here I would expect reference to the source material—how well are these references selected? Are they consistent? Is there some cherry-picking happening—can you think of a point in the text where the claims being made might be challenged or contradicted? Does the argument impose stasis or unilaterialism onto something that in the text is in fact depicted as dynamic or otherwise in development? How well does this hold up with your interpretation of these moments—can you interpret them differently? What do you make of that ambiguity?

Can you place a value judgement on the argument made? In other words: do you agree? This is basically just about synthesising your responses to all the other questions and evaluating how on the mark you think the argument is; how you would respond to it, how you might develop it, how it might have developed your understanding of the work or else can be applied to other parts of the text (or indeed, other texts).

Ultimately I think the best thing you can do here is develop your own positions on texts to the best of your ability—I find that writing my arguments out helps me to get to grips with them better—and engaging with analytical work relative to that, ie. going in with your own solid sense of understanding from which your response can be crafted; I have an older post here on some of the questions you can start asking when you’re looking to do so. Obviously this means keeping an open mind towards arguments that contradict your own or that you may not have thought of before, but knowing what you think and why you think it will make it a lot easier to notice what might be missing or contradictory in someone else’s work (or, again, what you yourself might have missed). Critical work is (imo) best thought of as a dialogue rather than a straightforward imparting of knowledge; how someone else’s analysis informs your own, and how yours informs theirs, without flattening this dynamic into a deference of superior authority on either end, is the clearest and most productive way to think about it all.

I hope this is helpful!

#ask #long post

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toushindai · 6 months ago

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Do you have any thoughts on the relationships between characters so far in Hades II? Any predictions? How would you say they compare to those of Hades 1? Btw, love your megzag fic. You were The Author I went to for them back when 1.0 just came out.

Hello anon, and thank you!! I miss megzag so much, they are my everything. I will say that no one in Hades II so far is seizing me quite the way they do, especially not ship-wise—but let’s put the rest of this under a cut.

Below the readmore is an absolute free-for-all of spoilers so please be careful!

Overall the impression I get—especially from how Mel talks to and about Aphrodite—is that Mel thinks of love as something she’ll get around to once she has a chance to sit down and study how it works, which obviously comes after her task in importance. Now this is not how matters of the heart work, which presumably is why it’s immediately obvious that she and Icarus are BIG into each other. Which is cute, undeniably. I wish them happiness. Though that’s not really quite shipping, is it.

I’m still waiting for melnem to seize me like it has everyone else; I’m not opposed, but as of yet I’m not quite seeing what they have to offer each other. They are both striving for each other, that’s something; I just don’t yet see how that pulls them into bed with each other. It seems like the last thing on either of their minds. Except they do keep talking about taking each other’s clothes off. Are they flirting? They may be. At the very least I think SGG is sending deliberate “don’t worry, we ARE going there” signs. So far I am not drawn in by Mel/Moros as a ship, either. I’d much rather that shit-stirring suggestion of Eris’s (that the Fates are trying to set him up) be something that he finds kind of perturbing, that his sisters would try to set him up with someone just because she’s been nice to him. I would ship Moros/Dora. I think that would be cute and funny.

No despite all odds what I am 4k words into so far is some meleris. Well. I mean, that’s what the file name is called, and there’s some making out involved, but I don’t know if this is going to become a romantic or even physical relationship by the time I get wherever I’m going with it. Listen… I just love Eris. This horrible little gremlin whose ideals absolutely no one around her respects, so in response she doubles down on her gremlinhood. She’s at odds with Mel by their very natures and yet Mel keeps coming over to her little corner to give her the same gift over and over. I think they find each other frustrating but in the way a pet finds a puzzle treat toy frustrating, and I don’t think they know what kind of relationship they’re building with each other, but certainly one is building. I don’t think Eris really knows what a friend feels like and I don’t think she knows how to behave to keep a friend. I don’t think Mel knows why she is extending kindness to Gal Who Keeps Shooting Her And Littering. I, the player, am absolutely approaching this from the perspective of “someone in Eris’s entire life needs to be stubbornly kind to her as opposed to every authority figure in her life treating her like a problem child” but I don’t know if Mel feels the same way, consciously or un-.

Eris is just all around a deeply interesting presence in the game—the Unseen seem to me to be a cult (neutral use of the word) to Nyx and Eris is absolutely a dissenting voice against that. And everything else. The game has done the opposite of selling me on either “Chronos should rule” OR “the Olympians should continue unopposed” so I think we should hear Eris out. Did you know that “strife” and “strive” come from the same root. Something something the importance of dissent. Let her cook. Explosives. And drink bath water I guess.

Other things of interest.

The “your family may be vain idiots you hate being around but it’s still an inherent good to interact with them” tone of the epilogue of Hades I never pleased me greatly; so far, Hades II seems to be going “got it, just because someone is related to you by blood doesn’t mean you inherently have to feel anything for them” which I—I—I agree with that. Fundamentally. BUT THAT’S MY FAMILYYYY AND I LOVE THEMMMM TToTT… Supergiant is doing a fascinating thing where the majority of their players know Mel’s family better than she does, where Mel questions how strongly she even wants revenge for the family she’s never known while we, clutching our keyboards or controllers, are snarling Let Me At Him Let Me At Him I Love Those People. The “what do I care? I don’t even know them” is so deeply upsetting and I think that once there is an actual endgame that will get addressed but I a little bit wish we had not been given that line until we were ready to deal with it because it currently gives me an emotion.

Hecate is so interesting as a contrast to Hades—in some ways she is encouraging Mel towards much better emotional health but also. but also. Putting tremendous pressure on her, and telling her she must not think of Hecate as her mother or the Crossroads as her home. Asking Mel to leave these gaping holes in her heart so that her blood family and original home can fill them someday. I have to wonder if there’s a part of Melinoë that feels like Hecate is withholding these things because Mel isn’t good enough yet, and—deeper still—a part of her that fears that if she cannot become good enough, she will be subject to the same impatient disdain that Hecate aims at Nemesis and Eris. I don’t think Hecate is evil but I think she maybe doesn’t see the effect her single-mindedness might have.

And lastly, Chaos. Chaos!! Last night Chaos asked me, “Do you tolerate my gates stabbing you and my mark making your life difficult just because you want to look at me” and you know what. Yeah. Their new design is everything in this whole world to me. Chaos I am going to change how I dye my undercut to be more like you. But also I absolutely love what they’re going through emotionally in this game. Listen, if they had turned the Fates over to Chronos just because they like thwarting the Fates, I would have winced but forgiven them. This is a known! I don’t require them to operate under human morality! But the fact that they feel they were deceived and the indications that this troubles them, that they are not USED to feeling troubled, that they look at the way things are currently and say I would like things to be different actually, that they ask Mel for a response when they confess their part in the current goings-on (despite there not really being a question there IIRC!) but wait until so deep into the game to do so—Chaos I Love You. Would You Like A Hug. We stan an alexithymic primordial originator. Also “perhaps he shall release them if you use sufficient violence” is the funniest sentence in the world and I will continue to do my best 🫡

#hades ii spoilers #hades ii #hades ii game #tou and the murder kitten #thanks for the ask!

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foggyfanfic · 2 months ago

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Vent Post about Writing Woes

They weren't lying when they said middles are hard. Just finished part one of my current big project, and I got part two mapped out in a very broad sense, but I just, I am struggling. I am writing the same version of the scene below the cut for the third time and I don't know if I'm happy with version three either. I love this AU I've come up with, and I love the ending I have planned, and other than the fact I wish I had a team of researchers to help me with historical accuracy I love the world building I've done, but this scene! I've tried skipping ahead a little, and coming back to it, I can write it out again and again but each time it just doesn't hit the write notes and I love the character interactions but it's just not... it doesn't have quite the right punch.

This is the version I definitely won't be using, because as much as I love Leandra, when I decided I would reuse my OC's for this AU it was more because I needed side characters, not a protagonist. She's too centered in a scene that is ultimately supposed to be about Pepa, her anxieties, and her relationship with her family. The current iteration I'm trying is just between her and Bruno, time will tell if that sticks for me.

Anyways, I'm just venting, I'm frustrated; context (including the scene in question) under the cut.

Context: The premise of the AU is that Pepa is a Disney Princess tm except instead of a Disney movie her story is a political intrigue set in the Disney Princess Extended Universe (the DPEU if you will). In Disney Princess tradition I have come up with a fake country that is totally not Colombia in the same way Arandelle is totally not Norway or Denmark. It is ultimately an 1850-60's Pepa/Felix fake dating AU and in the scene below Leandra is in the process of being pulled into the Madrigals' orbit because I needed a character to play spy, she's pretending to be a man because 1) plot reasons and 2) I had an idea for the funniest idiots to lovers plot for her and Bruno.

The next morning, Leandra was woken by one of the Madrigal sisters shouting, “You agreed to do what?!”

Leandra drummed the fingers of her good hand on the blankets of her borrowed bed, then decided that yes, she was more nosy than was ultimately sensible and she needed to know what had been agreed to and why it was shocking. Or she would die, probably.

She grabbed the medallion holding her glamor off the bedside table and put it on, then grabbed her trousers off the bed post and stepped into them. When she peeked her head out her door she briefly made eye contact with Bruno, who was doing the same, then immediately whipped her head towards his sisters in hopes that he wouldn’t see her blush. The witch had said the glamor would basically just be her, but male, so she couldn’t count on it to hide her expressions. Anything more complicated would have been out of her budget and would have taken too long.

“-not that big a deal, geez Juli, you’re acting like I joined a death cult. And look, you woke up Bruno. And…”

“Raul,” Leandra supplied.

“Right… Raul.”

“You agreed to ‘fake’ court the king, who you happen to have a crush on, knowing damn well becoming queen would be your worst nightmare,” Julieta said, crossing her arms, “it might not be joining a death cult, but it’s certainly a brain dead decision.”

“It’s to help draw out whoever’s trying to kill Bruno!”

“How does uh how does you making yourself the protagonist of a cheesy romance novel draw out the person trying to kill me?”

“Maybe the killer likes romance novels,” Leandra said before she could think better of it, “have we tried leaving a few under a box propped up by a stick?”

Both Julieta and Pepa sent them “shut up” looks, so Leandra raised her hands in surrender and backed into her borrowed room. She left the door cracked open while she tied her sash and buckled her belt, so she could continue eavesdropping on their conversation.

“I am actually confused,” Bruno said, “h-how does this draw out the person trying to kill me?”

“By putting a target on your sister’s back,” Minister Alma’s voice joined the conversation, dripping with disapproval, “if the purpose of these assassination attempts is to weaken this kingdom, our killer will go after anyone the king shows signs of potentially marrying.”

“Which is exactly why it needs to be me. Because I can protect myself.”

Leandra nodded along with Pepa a little. She had heard tales of how powerful Pepa was, only an idiot would attack her. She frowned and popped her head back out.

“Everybody knows you can shoot lightning, the fact that it’s you might actually dissuade any attempts,” she pointed out, accidentally cutting off whatever Minister Alma was about to say.

The minister did not seem put out by the interruption however, instead she gestured at Leandra and said, “That’s an excellent point. You doing this might not even work. It’s entirely likely that the only thing that will come out of this is a broken heart.”

Pepa scowled at Leandra, “Oh, who asked you?”

“Um, kind of sort of the king,” Leandra said, shrugging her good shoulder, “he wants me to help catch the guy so…”

“I thought he wanted you to guard me?” Bruno said, then sputtered, cheeks bright red, “n-not that-! I-I mean, that’s j-just what he told me, you don’t have to-.”

“Both, technically,” Leandra said, trying to spare the poor man the embarrassment of further rambling, “he wants me to do both.”

“Ah,” Bruno said, squeezing his eyes shut.

“Ah-ha!” Pepa suddenly shouted, pointing a finger at Julieta.

Julieta scowled at her, “No! No 'ah-ha', I didn’t say anything!”

“But I saw it, I saw that look on your face, you just had a thought you don’t want me to know about. Probably because it’d prove that I should totally do this!”

“You don’t know that, maybe I was just thinking that your hair is stupid,” Julieta sniffed, pointing her nose in the air.

“Your hair is stupid,” Pepa retorted.

“Girls,” Alma said, sighing deeply, “you’re adults.”

“Exactly, I’m an adult, which means I get to make my own decisions and I’ve decided to try and trap the asshole trying to kill my brother.”

“Just because you’re an adult doesn’t mean you’re a smart adult, apparently,” Julieta said.

“Except I am a smart adult, and you know it, because you just had ‘Pepa has a point’ face,” Pepa accused.

Julieta didn’t say anything, she just scowled at her sister.

Leandra shuffled her feet, examining Julieta, then slowly guessed at what Julieta had been thinking, “Having Pepa on his arm will probably dissuade any attempts to attack the king directly?”

Julieta whipped her head around to scowl at Leandra again, “Oh, who asked you!”

“The king did,” Pepa said, smugly, “and it is another excellent point. Thank you…”

“Raul,” Leandra reminded her.

“Yeah, sure, whatever. Thank you Raul.”

“It might be an excellent point, but it is one that contradicts your stated reason for doing this,” Alma huffed, “you can not help draw out our killer if you are also dissuading them from acting through your mere presence.”

Pepa frowned, but apparently didn’t have an argument ready for that.

“Are uh are you sure you’re not just doing this so you have an excuse to flirt with the king?” Bruno asked.

From the way Pepa grimaced, Leandra knew that was at least part of it. From the way she set her jaw, Leandra could tell it was only part of it.

“No,” Pepa said, then spent a few seconds struggling to find the words.

“You want to help and don’t know how?” Leandra asked.

“Sí,” Pepa said, at first triumphant, happy to have the words handed to her, then a little sheepishly, “sí, I… hate that somebody is trying to hurt my brother and I don’t want to just wait around for each assassin they send. I want to stop them. Don’t you guys?”

“Not if it puts you in danger,” Bruno immediately huffed, drawing Leandra’s attention. He had taken her by surprise before, so she studied him carefully while he spoke, “the last thing I want is you putting yourself in danger for my sake.”

“Well the last thing I want is for you to be in danger, so I guess you’re just going to have to deal.”

“Except you’re out voted, I would also like it if you didn’t put yourself in danger,” Julieta said.

“Sí. If I had my way, none of you would be in any danger, ever. It’s one thing that outside forces keep endangering your brother, I don’t need you endangering yourself.”

“I’ll be fine,” Pepa waved their concerns off, “and even better, I will be involved in the investigation. I won’t have to wait around and hope, I’ll be doing something. That’s- you can’t stop me.”

Leandra leaned against the doorframe and watched the other occupants of the room to see who would break against Pepa’s stubborn will first. She expected Minister Alma to be the strongest hold out, but she broke second after Julieta, it was Bruno who held out the longest. But eventually he sighed and shook his head, then turned back into his room.

See what I mean? Leandra is too centered. Tried writing the same argument without her there but then I have to make the Madrigals way better at communicating with each other as a whole than they would be. That's how I arrived at doing this one on one, if their dysfunctional family is anything like mine then they are way better at talking to each other in pairs than they are all together. It's going fine but I'll have to see if it's still fine when I've finished writing this scene again, I'll have to see if the mood flows from the chapter before this one, into this, into the chapter after this well. Then I'll go from there.

Ugh! Whatever. I refuse to give up on this AU but part two is definitely kicking my ass! Might continue ranting about this one to help myself stay motivated, because I will finish this one. I will.

#foggy rambles #foggy writes #foggy rants #encanto AU #leandra lopez

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thistle--bug · 1 month ago

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I ramble about the Untamed

I just finished watching the Untamed with my sister (it took roughly 3 months lol) and I just wanted to write down a barely coherent collection of thoughts I had about it

This was my first c-drama actually! I feel like I started with the finest one

When I started, I thought "how could you possibly need FIFTY episodes for this story?" and as it went on I kept thinking "how can this take ONLY fifty episodes?". Still now I think they could've used a few more episodes to flesh out some arcs better and the last arc did feel a little rushed

Although I get what happened and where it was left at worked for the story, we were ROBBED of more Husaisang content. I want to see him do necromancy and be clever!

The juniors were genuinely the BEST addition to the story. Not only did it let us see how Lan Zhan was bringing about the future of his clan and raising them with less restrictions, but they were just so cute. They helped the old stubborn cultivators accept change and trust Wei Wuxian more as well! And of course I adore Jin Ling. His relationship with Jiang Cheng may not be the typical sweet and warm uncle-nephew relationship but there is so much love and care there. Jiang Cheng may disguise his care as anger, but because Jin Ling is the same way he sees through it. He tells Wei Wuxian immediately that Jiang Cheng would never hurt him, even if he promises to break his knees every day.

Wei Wuxian and Lan Zhan have the central romantic relationship, sure, but the show writes every relationship with care and importance. Friendships like Wei Wuxian's and Wen Ning's are extremely important, as well as familial ones like Wei Wuxian and his Yunmeng siblings. With that, I think the sibling relationships are done exceedingly well. They are loving but complex and turbulent. Like I don't know any personal details but I bet you that MXTX has siblings 100%.

Honestly my favorite dynamics were Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian, the three sworn brothers (they FASCINATE ME), the whole messy ass Xueyang trio, and Wei Wuxian with the Wen siblings

Is Jin Ling leader now? I hope not, he's too young!

Obviously Jiang Cheng is my favorite. This man can't express any emotion in a healthy way to save his life and I, for one, find it endearing. I don't understand how people genuinely dislike his, especially considering how he was 18-19 when he became leader like.... do you realize how young that is and what that does to someone!!! Anyways, yeah, I don't care, I support his every action even when he's being a bitch

I wasn't expecting him to become so important tbh but I really adore Lan Xichen. He's genuinely the kindest. He is Wangxian's #1 wingman, even when they both threaten the image of his entire clan that he leads. He extends nothing but pure kindness towards Jin Guangyao even when he was at his lowest rank. Sure, his trust may have been his downfall at the end, but I admire him for it all the same

You know who else I admire a lot? JIANG YANLI!!!! Her blind 100% complete trust for Wei Wuxian even at his very worst moments is so commendable and I adore her for it. He NEEDED that

The music in this show is so damn good. Both the score and the character theme songs! My favorites have to be Wei Wuxian, Xueyang and Jiang Cheng's theme songs, because the voices are so pretty! And Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng's actors sang it themselves too :)

While it has a huge sprawling story, the actual message they tell over and over is quite simple: Kindness is essential. Like, we are given characters like Xueyang and Jin Guangyao that had a similar childhood to Wei Wuxian. Without a parent, abandoned, poor, and looked down upon because of their low status. The reason Wei Wuxian grew up to be a good person is because over and over again, he was treated kindly. Jiang Fengmian brought him into his family and he had siblings that adored him. Jin Guangyao and Xueyang weren't given that kindness and therefore weren't able to give any of it out either.

The golden core transfer reveal was so well done. I knew what had happened but I was SO curious how Jiang Cheng would finally find out. Bless Wen Ning for spilling everyone's tea lol. The way Jiang Cheng and Lan Zhan both had flashbacks to moments where Wei Wuxian was seemingly arrogant made them look cruel now. Everyone acted that scene out so WELL

I appreciate the efforts to push against censorship as much as possible. The actors added their own little flavor, small details like Wangxian bowing thrice as married couples do in front of ancestors, framing of certain scenes, and more...

The pacing and set up of this show were done really well! I think starting us out with the post-death Wei Wuxian era worked out so well because we knew some huge details of what had happened, but it left me itching and burning with the need to know how all this could possibly unfold and it really kept my attention the whole time

the distinct architecture and scenery of each clan was so beautiful!

Although I got truly hooked a little later on, I am so fond of the simple times of the Cloud Recesses. They were so young and carefree and that's the only time we really got Huaisang and Wuxian bestie time (which I really miss)

Okay I think that's all I got for now. This show unleashed the unbridled love and obsession for a piece of media I haven't felt in a while

#mdzs #the untamed #untamed #grandmaster of demonic cultivation #mo dao zu shi

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tiger-is-a-certified-idiot · 1 year ago

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Hey [fairly long] little Arcane something I’ve never seen anyone point out…

VIKTOR IS JUST AS EGOTISTICAL AS JAYCE IS!

(And I can prove it)

Showing this is the entire point of Sky’s existence in the show…she was always there for him, there was always another person who wanted to be there with him, but he never noticed because he was always to focused on himself.

Then, when he’s finally an adult, he claims his life’s dream is to “make the world a better place” and that the work he is doing is to help the undercity. But before any of that, it’s “do you think it was my life’s dream to become an assistant?”

And it is worth noting at that point, that Sky is Still There. She follows him all the way to the top, and he still doesn’t notice. Instead he, entirely in his own interest, seeks out Jayce. Someone he has never met or talked to before, simply because his story intrigued him.

Sure, Jayce signed every page of his notes, he assumed he was a moral exception to the city’s safety regulations, he thought a little speech could change the councilor’s minds, he abandoned his work for his girlfriend.

But Viktor isn’t a selfless martyr, and id argue he’s really not much better than Jayce. He worked his way out of the undercity because he “believed in himself,” not in his city nor his family, he wanted to prove HIMSELF. And he did, and it wasn’t enough for him. So he decided he was a moral exception to breaking and entering laws. And what do you know, that wasn’t enough. He kept raising the bar. True, he didn’t go on stage, but it’s because his ego doesn’t involve his image the way it does for Jayce. He doesn’t care who knows his face, but not having his invention shown was brutal to him. It isn’t enough. Eventually he realized he’s dying and immediately decided he would pour every ounce of his life into extending it rather than going out with a bang. He manages to kill Sky, symbolically proving just how little other people mattered to him compared to his own life. When he pours out her ashes, he talks to Heimerdinger, and he’s starting to realize just how badly he fucked up. But all he can find to talk to the professor about is the unfairness of death and the professor’s opinion on his own contributions. Not his and Jayce’s, or on Humanity’s or anything like that. At the end of his rope he still can’t let go of this overwhelming fear that he hasn’t done enough. It’s always personal.

Breakdown of their final scene:

Now this is why I love that final scene with Jayce and Viktor sitting in the skull-shaped pipe above the gorge Viktor grew up playing in. Viktor sees the place he had never thought was good enough somehow drained of all the life and color he hadn’t noticed was there. And Jayce, more afraid of death than anything else in the world, is sitting above a valley symbolically teeming with it. And they both finally come to the end of their egotist character arcs. It’s no longer Did I Do Enough. It’s no longer How Do I Fix This. It’s “We lost ourselves, We lost our dream, in the pursuit of Great, we failed to do Good.” They realize they’ve both fucked up, together. They’ve both been terrible, together. They know that nothing, not one thing they have done to this world has improved it. They are killers, egotists, villains. Their dreams are dead and their visions of their lives and of themselves are dead. Yes, Viktor is dying too, but I don’t think that’s the point. They set themselves the one task of saving lives and all they managed to do was kill.

So they, now changed men, make a vow. They’re going to make it right. Or Viktor does, anyway. But Jayce promises him he’ll destroy the hexcore which I think could mayyyybe possibly mean he’s tied himself into the promise as well i Sincerely Hope.

Have they made up? Yes, I think they have. They are not naive anymore at the very least and are going to handle both their relationship and their respective jobs responsibly and like adults. Does this mean they will manage it? I doubt it, to be honest. If we do end up getting the Machine Herald in any similar way to League, Jayce does have to be his narrative foil, and I don’t think the little moments of going behind each other’s backs and doing things the other wouldn’t approve of + their bridge argument are going to just not affect their relationship. I would be incredibly surprised if the Divorce doesn’t happen. Will they resolve it? No idea. I haven’t decided if I’m in camp Arcane Will Have a Good Ending or Arcane Will Have a Bad Ending yet. Either way, I do hope their relationship stays layered and complex and that they never lose respect and admiration for each other. They are narratively Two Halves of a Whole and it would honestly break my heart if they were to stop being written that way. I do hope they make up in the end, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

Thank you for reading! I am aware that my analysis are very opinion oriented and not particularly objective at all, I enjoy sharing my interpretation of the show as much as I can. That being said, there is a lot of room for discussion here because it’s all opinions, and I would love to hear yours. <33

#arcane #arcane analysis #viktor #jayce talis #jayvik #arcane theory

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de-mortem · 10 months ago

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Childe Kinnie: A Character Analysis and Introspection

To immediately dive in: Childe is the poster child for C-PTSD. C-PTSD forms from experiencing repeated trauma for an extended period of time, the brain being forced to function solely on survival on a day to day basis, fitting Childe exactly, and is probably why I've, sadly, boasted him as one of my highest kins despite him being from Genshit (I am AR55 I can say that). Childe's trauma and his various methodologies of dealing with it and living with it are shown throughout his story and, your honor, make him So Me.

To begin: what caused Childe to form C-PTSD? Childe's trauma is, obviously, rooted from his fall into the Abyss. Although the experience isn't fully described in lore, it's easy to assume he had to be on constant alert, ready to fight at any given moment. It's here he met his teacher, Skirk, that allowed him to have the fighting skills necessary to survive in the Abyss and excel as a fighter in Teyvat. Obviously, having to be taught means he wasn't always a skilled fighter, and he undoubtedly would've had several close encounters during his time in the Abyss, on top of fighting requiring excessive alertness, especially when constantly in a hostile environment. Thus, being alert becomes a constant in his life.

Biologically, what is happening is stress hormones are constantly being pumped into the system, inducing the body into a constant state of fight, flight, or freeze. This state of mind is one that will continue to plague the mind and body for an extended period of time, and will affect relationships and viewing oneself moving forward. We can potentially see this in him being unable to form any meaningful relation with his peers–although such can also be blamed due to the eccentricness of the Harbingers themselves, who are… characters, to say the very least. Either way, there is a disconnect shown between them, with Harbingers either viewing their youngest as an oddity or with Childe looking upon them with disdain for how they follow through in their ways. Straightforward, Childe fights, and dislikes stopping to scheme like he peers frequently do.

Another addition to Childe's relations–although more of a headcanon–is a strained relationship with his family (younger siblings disincluded). Coming back to normalcy, Ajax (who had undoubtedly changed in an irreparable manner) is headcanon to have been ostracized from his family–those old enough to have seen the change. Ajax was once a frightened, hesitant boy, and within the span of three days the young boy had turned into a bloodthirsty weapon, quite literally losing the spark in his eye. He was unable to go back to living a normal life, and due to it, had his relationship with his parents completely uprooted. Unable to handle this new personality, the complete opposite of the young teen that walked off just three days prior, they sent him off to the Fatui, where his survivability made him thrive and Tartaglia was rightly born.

Upon the topic of Tartaglia, it is also of note his three names, and that they represent, because of course I relate to it as well. The names represent not only different periods of his life, but different personalities, or state of being he is. To begin: Ajax. Ajax, easily identifiable, represents the child that lived in innocence up until his fourteenth year. It carries the hope of a fair and good life, where nothing went wrong and happiness was of abundance. It is his inner child, the spark that once lit his eyes.

Tartaglia comes next. Tartaglia comes from the cruelty of the Abyss, of surviving and of the power he holds. It is a title that shows he has survived–the youngest Harbinger, the Tsaritsa's Vanguard: Tartaglia is a shield. Tartaglia is the hypervigilance of his surroundings, the need for bloodshed, to maim any potential threat before it can hurt him. Tartaglia is isolated, above any common soldier or general, disconnected to his fellow Harbingers, unable to see the reasons behind why they act. Tartaglia is a weapon, meant to be used, to serve a purpose in a way he doesn't decide: so unable to do anything other than survive, knowing how to do nothing other than fight, it makes sense to dedicate himself fully as the Tsarita's weapon. Ultimately, Tartaglia boasts his trauma and shows you just how well he can fight, that he is still surviving.

Childe, then, is the remnant of hope. Childe is the mask worn–it is what he introduces himself as, the showing of a cheerful, childlike man. Friendly and confident, willing to protect and keep any promise held. A fierce dedication to his family–parcels of letters and medication sent back to the family that sent their teenager to the military. Childe, willing to sacrifice his health, even like, for the sake of his little brother who unknowingly wandered into mortal. Childe is the want of normalcy. The want to create a place safe enough to do something more than survive–to let Ajax breathe for the first time in years. Willing to sacrifice himself for the sake of those the holds dear, Childe would do anything for the approval that he lacks from his peers and family.

Three separate states of being, three separate all conglomerating into one fucked up guy. A silly guy who puts on a front that to either hide away from his trauma or to boast how he has survived. A constant switch, unable to lice without the other: both Childe and Tartaglia, who hold the dying corpse of Ajax in their arms: one trying desperately to heal him, the other desperately trying to protect him. Ajax needs both to survive, but is given only one or the other, never both, never given any gasp of air to breathe.

The change of names could also hold significance in trying to avoid–another common symptom of C-PSTD. By changing such an integral part of himself, it creates a distance between who he is now versus who he was then. Perhaps it is projection: I, too, changed my name to separate myself from who I was, from the trauma that clung to my life in the past, which makes it of perfect sense to why it is fitting, then, for Childe to boast three separate names. Ajax and the trauma of the Abyss, to Tartaglia and his time spent in the military and ostracized from his peers, and Childe who, hopefully, will rise apart from the names that haunt his every step.

Ultimately, he is just a silly little guy with a shitton of trauma. A jokester whose need to survive slips in every now and then, a constant reminder of the harshness he faced on a prolonged basis. And because of that, your honors he is sooooo me. Me fr. Omg. Me if I didn't get therapy.

also there's a lot of jesus allegations, analogies, & theories going around by childe fans/mains, and who am i if not a lover of catholic imagery??

#sighs #Childe Ajax Tartaglia I love you #Genshin #genshin childe #childe #tartaglia #genshin impact #kinlist #kin list #character analysis #character introspection #i probably couldve also analyzed his song #oh well #i feel so emo #childe main

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ceranovis · 10 months ago

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Some musings to do with this celltw pic

As a fandom I feel like we could be doing So Much More with Other Side Elements being canon + all the connected Ordem worldbuilding it introduces by association.

Canonically, Cellbit chose to align himself with the knowledge element. So I hopped on over to the ordem wiki page for Knowledge to look for things to put in the paperwork on the table. Then I realized there's a memory alteration ritual (accidentally pulled the wrong ritual circle image for the art though oTL ...let's just pretend Cellbit identified the right one at some point).

The [Change Memory Ritual] can erase all or only some specific memories of the victim. In both cases, if the victim comes into contact with people, places and certain objects that were part of this past erased, it will begin to gradually recall some elements and have quick flashes of some moments, being able to recover its memory completely after a while.

Now listen. If there's one thing I think of as core to q!Cellbit's character, it's that as far as he's concerned the ends always justifies the means. This includes doing things he knows people he loves will hate him for because he thinks it will be better for them in the long run.

In the regret arc letters, he told Tazercraft he loved them, that Cell was dead & he didn't want them to think he was reverting to that type of monster. While there were a few moments where he brought up clearly unresolved feelings of anger and betrayal/abandonment regarding how things went with Fuga, I do think at that point he cared for the Favela crew as a found-family, and was making decisions he felt were in their best interest (usually without consulting them, or like...running those ideas by anyone else ever...)

If he discovered a way to erase specific memories, I could fully see him using that to 'make things better' for Pac. I doubt he'd try to erase all the Fuga memories (especially as he'd have to also erase Mike and Felps) but I also don't think he'd feel like he had to go that far anyways.

Earlier on in the Quesadilla timeline, Pac seemed to think of Cell as basically dormant and was relatively comfortable with having a fairly close and positive relationship with Cellbit. He only grew paranoid about Cell re-emerging when he saw signs of Cellbit snapping, and he first responded by actively trying to keep Cellbit in a headspace that wouldn't lead to that. There have been multiple instances of Pac extending a bit of grace, an unspoken offer not to forgive or forget but to move forward. He wants Cellbit to be a good man, not a monster.

So I think Cellbit would use the ritual to smooth over events that put a strain on their current relationship. Things that made Pac scared he was turning back into Cell. And he'd probably justify it as 'helping' Pac, but there's also a selfish element there too, of him desperately trying to keep hold of this new start and family he probably doesn't deserve but somehow got anyways.

It's small things at first-- just wiping away little instances that put Pac on edge around him. Pac is prone to glossing over Cellbit's red flags anyways, so even if other people remember what Pac doesn't, it wouldn't set off immediate alarm bells. Nobody would catch on to the manipulation.

Pac himself would write off most of the weird, vague flashes he gets sometimes. It feels sort of like deja vu but with an extra helping of uneasy dread. He's not very self-confident when it comes to his brain; he's just being unreasonably paranoid because of his memories of Cell-- those half-memories are so foggy because his brain is panicking and conflating the past with the present, right? More importantly, wants to trust Cellbit.

Now, there's a clip of Pac (which I can't find now but it lives in my head rent free) where he implies that, if Cellbit and Roier hadnt been introduced, he and Cellbit would have been together.

There are a few points in the canon timeline where guapoduo could have been derailed. Cellbit may never have even gotten to that point with Roier if he and Pac were already a little bit closer. If he was fucking with Pac's memories in a way that made Pac less cautious of him, I think it's entirely possible their relationship would have had a chance to develop in place of guapoduo's.

Cellbit didn't start erasing memories with the intention of getting Pac to fall for him though. He wanted the olive branch Pac extended. He wanted Pac to not be terrified of him. But it never occured to him that Pac might be capable of falling in love with the man who ate his goddamn leg. So it completely blindsides him when Pac does, in fact, very deliberately step over the line between platonic and romantic in their relationship.

It feels a lot more morally dubious to be manipulating Pac's memories once that happens. But he's in too deep. He knows Pac would hate him if he found out the truth. But isn't it better this way anyways? Pac, somehow, impossibly, wants to love him-- it's not like he's forcing Pac feel anything about him, right? He knows how terrible betrayal feels-- and he doesn't have to make Pac feel that way, doesn't have to hurt him like that! All he has to do is omit the truth. It's not even a lie, really.

He wants Pac to be happy, wants to preserve the warmth Pac looks at him with now, and if holding his tongue is what assures that... well he can swallow down the guilt gnawing at him and bear that mental burden for both of them. Theres so much in their history for him to feel guilty about anyways, what's one more thing?

Unfortunately for Cellbit, he's never used the ritual on people prior to this, and the books he got it from were light on details as to how it works. He has no idea that the locks on Pac's memories start to slowly erode as soon as he encounters a trigger. And since all of the erased memories are of Cellbit, their time together is just speeding up that process.

Eventually, Pac regains a memory he can't just brush off. And he has to come to terms with the fact that something is very, very wrong between them even if he doesn't understand exactly what's happening to him. He'd figure it out eventually, go through Cellbit's notes in secret and piece things together. When he does he's horrified and angry and heartbroken. But he's torn too because it's not like he can just forget the relationship they've built either, even if he now knows the foundation is half rotted.

He still loves Cellbit, despite every fucked up thing Cellbit has ever done to him.

The question is really whether Pac loves himself enough to pull the plug on this unhealthy dynamic.

#musings #canon divergent au #qsmp au #celltw #qsmp shipping

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