#because my schedule is unreliable lol

[humsbugs]

what is up my fellow whores here’s a little teaser for some things I intend to get around to writing this year:

poland gets a religious candle shoved up his ass (not those gigantic ones, sorry guys) [sacrilege warning], two things with china (one with imperial japan and one with NK), possibly a continuation of Sunflowers, YES a continuation of the sovame story it will come eventually don’t pressure me about it aaand since we’re talking about my multi-work stories I will be writing more of Abject Fascination because that one helps me relax and whatever entity is out there knows I need it.

warning about my most annoying writing quirk: I don’t like writing about the same characters in a row so don’t expect, say, the china stories to be back to back. it irks me I don’t know why ^_^

[restlesspazzi04]

bestieeeee will we get an update tonight? or tmrw?

im reluctant to give exact times bc before i lowkey got people getting mad bc i didn't uphold my word

usually when that happens its bc i think of a scene I want to add and just decide to hold off uploading j to let ugs know i dont mean to be unreliable i just have a weird need to overinclude things

that being said i am essentially 90% done and am planning on uploading before i pass out so im thinking 7 am (don't judge my sleep schedule, my user is restlessnights for a reason lol)

the reason this chapter took so long was because i was going to originally going to make these two different chapters, but decided i wanted to get certain scenes out bc ik ugs been waiting patiently <3

this chapter is now projected 16k words bc of this choice btw

yeah i went a little crazy sorry yall the cruise pics got me feral these days

[inkedtae]

I think the Rotten Angelcake story has way too many cliffhangers. It makes it difficult to enjoy the episode properly because I know that I will have questions that are not answered. It is good to have suspense but considering your upload schedule, I find myself not wanting to know what happens.

Secondly, the story is told. I think in movies they say “don’t tell, just show”. I would rather read the things happening rather than read about it. For example, you mention some jewellery Taehyung gifted. Also, what happened in that theatre? How did Angel take her punishment? I read all the story for it to end in a vague way and it is discouraging. I think it would be more meaningful if I read things happening. Some might be good for foreshadowing, but more times than that I feel like I am reading a summary of what happened with minimal actual dialogue.

By no means you are a bad writer. I think you are brilliant at writing. You have excellent characters that do not weave. We could all gauge how each of your characters would react to certain things. The characters don’t feel rushed. But in general, the story line feels dragged. The story progression feels passive. Most of the episodes are short to average in length and repeat in a certain cycle. I don’t mean to be crude and ask for them to have intercourse, but this back on forth is depressing. I wouldn’t be surprised if Taehyung and Angel went their separate ways. Same thing with Angel’s boss. How many episodes will it take for that storyline to unravel?

I don’t want to come across rude, but I couldn’t stop writing this because I genuinely like Rotten Angelcake. I hope I wrote this with grace and you can take it gracefully. Please take care of yourself and thank you for your time ❤️

hey anon!

first i wanna say thank you so much for reading and being patient with me. i really appreciate that 💕

i completely understand your frustration and confusion. with an unreliable update schedule and more or less formulaic chapters, it can seem very difficult to remain optimistic about or interested in the story. for that i apologize! i don’t mean to be so absent or fall into a predictable format.

to explain, which by no means excuses anything but is just to give some context, my initial goal with rac was to post drabbles of this couple without a certain overarching plot and really just use this series to work through personal feelings, issues, and life experiences. it is probably my most personal series since it reflects so much of my emotions and life. i was just going to post what i felt like, when i felt like, and just what i was feeling at the time. however as i started to write their relationship i really liked the tension and the uncertainty that was between them because it was really reflective of a certain part in my life. so this is kinda of why it seems like things are dragging on. there was no initial direction and i was just posting short scenes of them discovering angels sexuality together until maybe chapter nine or ten when she goes to meet his family. before that it was just a trope-y, smutty series of drabbles. i was not looking to be original or challenge any concepts. overall, i just wanted an open-ended collections of drabbles about how these two people, who don’t know how to come to terms with or navigate their feelings for each other, are super horny lol

however, since i have shifted this to a more “structured” (and i use that word loosely because i now know what i wanna do but not quite how i wanna get there) series, its been harder to write. the plot point for her boss, for example, is hard to wrap up because now i have to reference a plot point from five chapters ago that was a passing detail to establish a sexual interaction. and i recognize that it will be confusing so i'm trying bridge some gaps through this transition from drabbles to “proper” chapters. if i could rewrite this, the series would probably be around five or six chapters instead and much longer and probably less confusing to follow.

also i want to apologise for the vague endings. i can see how that can be really disappointing. you waited all this time for it to end without a clear understand of what's going on and it’s discouraging! i'm really sorry about that.

so moving forward, i will be establishing an update schedule that you can rely on and that i can definitely meet (which i had already had planned on doing after a blog revamp). i will also try to give you more solid endings and more answers rather than questions!

thank you for sharing your thoughts! i don’t think you were being rude. you were just sharing how you feel which is always appreciated. whether or not you choose to keep reading, i just wanna thank you again for giving it a chance. i hope that i have addressed all your concerns! ☺️🫶🏼

[twig-tea]

Love in the Big City Part 1: Reliable and Unreliable Narration

This post will be a ramble capturing of my reactions and thoughts and linking other meta where it applies. I did think about the discussion questions by @bengiyo but haven't set out specific question-by-question answer per se.

[if you don't know what this is about, check out the initial post about the book club, and if you'd like to join, here's the post with the overall schedule]

First, I am just going to acknowledge that I struggle with stories written in the first person, but this book is good enough that I got over this hang-up pretty quickly. I really love how both the narrator's self-awareness and his lack of self-awareness comes through in this writing style--he is very reliable a narrator around his own faults (as he brags to his readers), but unreliable about his own feelings. This is reflective of his emotional intelligence and lack of self-understanding or self-interrogation around his emotions. A few moments stand out to me around this: He mentions explicitly that he often laughs when he is actually angry and only realizes he is mad after the fact; He is also shocked at the level of hurt he feels at Jaehee's betrayal, and doesn't understand his own reaction; and he similarly gives no indication of having any emotional attachment to K3 in terms of how he talks about him, though he keeps and returns to his last text message and thinks about how he had imagined K3 remaining in his life through his future.

All this is to say, once I realized the disaffected tone was intentional and also unreliable, I got really invested in this novel and enjoyed Part I a lot!

I agree with the read of the narrator and Jaehee's relationship as a Queer Platonic Relationship as @doyou000me wrote here, and I agree with @lurkingshan that this relationship went unrecognized in the novel because these characters did not have the words to understand or characterize the relationship they were in. I can also relate; my roommate and I in my 20s were both queer, on the aroace spectrum, and were one another's plus-one for everything from work parties to family events. We lived together for ~4 years. We shared cooking and cleaning duties, spent every evening together, vacationed together (we even went on a vacation just the two of us while they were dating other people), and it was only when we realized (without realizing that's what we were realizing) that we could not have further emotional intimacy with one another and we "broke up" (by spending less time together, no longer sharing meals, it was all very avoidant and immaturely handled lol) that they eventually got serious with someone else and moved out.

I now have a few queer platonic relationships that I'm in consciously that are as close as Jaehee and the narrator, where we share all kinds of intimate details about our lives and plan major things like where we'll move to around one another; and my awareness is much better for managing and understanding my emotions around them. This is part of why I think this read is so compelling; it helps explain some of the disaffected writing style overall in this part, because when I didn't have words for the relationship I was in, I didn't understand and sometimes didn't acknowledge the feelings I had about it. And the way Jaehee slowly but easily transitioned into putting her relationship with her boyfriend/fiance/husband first; @my-rose-tinted-glasses connected this to atanormativity in her post, and that resonates for me too.

This connects also to something @lurkingshan talked about here around life stages and how these two people only worked while they were in the same life stage, and since the expectations they had on their own lives and that everyone had on them were so different, those life stages did not align and would not align forever. The way the narrator talked about not ever wanting to be married and not understanding why Jaehee, who seemed to feel the same way he did about life and love, would want to get married, really resonated with me as a queer arospec person who has always struggled to understand why other people want the things they want in their lives, and always feeling out of step with where they're headed. It's been interesting actively trying to keep friendships with people who got married and had kids, for example. I wrote a list of my own list of alternative milestones for anyone who falls outside of allonormative and atonormative lives.

One thing I wanted to highlight that I think @my-rose-tinted-glasses also alluded to was that the betrayal the narrator experiences when Jaehee shares their secret and outs him to her boyfriend was a betrayal because Jaehee puts her boyfriend's needs over the narrator's. This happens again with the wedding planning, where she assumed she could ask the narrator to be her emcee and then had to renege on the request because her fiance had someone he wanted to use and it was 'traditional' that the groom's side get to set the emcee. The narrator basically shrugs this off but we can tell by the way he talks about the wedding, the emcee, and the bitterness that exudes from the page, in addition to how quickly he leaves, that he has feelings about this.

Unrelated but one of the things I noticed about the health scares that I haven't seen mentioned yet is that Jaehee is yelled at by the doctor for being irresponsible with her sexual health; in contrast, the narrator is responsible about his sexual health by bringing his sexual parter for testing at the first sign of a potential STI, and he is made fun of and feels explicitly embarased. I haven't fully thought through all of the implications of this but thought I'd add it to the discourse while I think about it some more this week!

When going into Part 2, I'm going to be thinking about the cover of the book and how the two versions I've seen have either blueberries and Marlboros, or fingertips stained with blueberry juice making a finger heart. I am wondering whether these will become visual leitmotifs for the rest of the novel, or whether Jaehee's role in the narrator's life and these physical manifestations of their bond will be left in part 1; and if so, it's interesting that these themes resonated strongly enough with the publisher to put this visual on the cover. Either way, it indicates their importance and the importance of this relationship in the narrator's story overall.

[arkhammaid]

Oh my God I love the spoilers, it's almost 4 here and I need to go to sleep but my mind will probably keep thinking about fem Osvar for another hour.

RIP my sleep schedule but it's worth it. The whole idea of fem Oscar has already got me so pumped up, I will probably start screaming when you publish the work.

i can share with you my plans for the second fic to girl!oscar if you want 👀(oscar is a very unreliable narrator because she's only thinking about winning and forgets to mention like the rest of what's happening lol)

also. first chapter is done. this fic is now no longer an oneshot, but a three chaptered fic (or at least i hope so, let's see where girl!oscar takes me)

[burningdarkfire]

tbh it was a silly thing to realize that some of my friends obsessively check public transit schedules because it's so unreliable in their cities. like yes i also grew up in a place like that but then i moved downtown into a big city and the subway comes once every 2-3 minutes and the major buses and street cars come every 5-10 minutes and i rarely have anywhere to be that has a hard start time, so i just leave my house roughly when i need to and expect the public transit to show up shortly after i do so. and then it does (mostly). i know this is the simplest thought in the world but tbh i haven't not stopped thinking about it since realizing it. like i will complain every day of the week about how dirty and dangerous the subway is and how they're always shutting it down in the evenings and weekends to do track work but actually i guess it's pretty okay in my city all things considered

still the shanghai metro was like 100x better though lol

[psychic-refugee]

@hibernatingwithgrizzlies has a great post on the accuser’s suspicious back and forth of her claims to have gone to the police or that she has “evidence.”

In general, I think this collection is good at showing her to be unreliable and possibly deranged. I won’t speak further on mental health issues, as I am not a mental health expert. But as a layperson in regard to mental health, I think she looks troubled and cannot be described as a reasonable person.

Supposedly, this woman has gone to court before against alleged rapists. She doesn’t make clear if she won, but she does say that she felt “healed.”

My question is, what’s the caption (e.g. Brunelle v. Accused for civil, or R. v. Accused for criminal) and court number (e.g. 4813998227000658599)? What’s the name of the courthouse or its address? Who was the judge? Was it a bench or jury trial?

If these things actually happened, there is some documented proof somewhere, and she should be able to answer these questions.

I would very much like to read the outcome of that case, if it happened.

She wants to air all this stuff on SocMed EXCEPT anything that would lend her some credibility.

The same with going to the police. What’s the police report number? What’s the name of the officer she spoke with? Which station did she report to?

She doesn’t have to have ALL of this information, but I find it suspicious that she has NONE of it.

She goes back and forth on whether she has proof at all or if she has “proper” proof. She’s very fast and loose with her language and expects us to just guess or psychically know what she meant at any given time. She’s ok with giving SS and other suspect proof but is apparently holding onto some other unnamed proof which she considers proper.

She uses the qualifier of “now” to describe the proof she has…like how did you get proof of something happening years ago to manifest when you didn’t have it before?

And despite having this proof, still isn’t initiating criminal or civil proceedings. She is waiting for PHW to initiate them…for reasons I cannot fathom or indulge. (see what I did there? lol)

Like…police aren’t going to take their direction from rando tweets on SocMed. If she refuses to give her proof to the police and press charges, then he’s not going to be arrested if her supposed proof is “proper” enough. That’s just how it works.

Despite her claims, I doubt his attorneys will suggest PHW spend thousands upon thousands of his own money to try to claim or get a lien against assets she claims she has on Facebook. A civil suit is unlikely coming from his end IMO.

The Crown may sue her for the CSAM/Revenge Porn images if they were made aware of it. Again, the police are not trolling SocMed for leads on crime. They deal with enough actual crime and reports coming in daily. Just look at the daily docket for Ontario: https://www.ontariocourtdates.ca/default.aspx

It is possible that PHW had reported that nude photos of himself have been leaked and passed it onto the police. We might not have heard anything because criminal cases tend to work in stealth so that the criminal doesn’t have the awareness to try to destroy evidence ahead of time.

The fact that the photos were taken down, makes me think the website was compelled to. It may be because it was reported and they have a Standard Procedure to take down any reported CSAM, or it’s possible the police got involved. There’s no way to tell at this junction.

PHW might not waste time and money on a civil suit, but he could be willing to seek justice through pressing charges and letting the Crown take the case. He would have to be available for a statement and going to court, I don’t know him well enough to say if he’d do that. I also don’t know his schedule if he thinks it’s worth pursuing.

I’m just saying this is a possibility.

The government works slow as hell, so I wouldn’t be surprised if PHW had reported his nudes leaked, that it’d be several months before anything happened and the public was made aware. We’re also talking about warrants and digital forensics. All of that takes time and money.

We’re definitely talking more than a year between the crime and someone going to prison. That’s how slow the system is.  

If I were the accusers, that’d be the thing I’d be worried about the most. PHW knows who he gave those photos to. If the police speak with them, then any lawyer would tell them to cooperate and rat out whom they might have shared those photos and then went on to post them online. The government does not like HAVING to go to court, and will cut deals if you save them time and money by cooperating with them.

Just look at the Josh Dugger case. Digital forensics had proof of where he got the CSAM, the computer he used, and the modem the information traveled through. They'll be able to trace who posted those photos.

Whatever evidence the accuser thinks she has, it’s not going to matter in a criminal Revenge Porn or CSAM case. There is no allowance for motive or any exemption for spreading CSAM/Revenge Porn.

“The motives of the accused are irrelevant.” R.S.C., 1986, C-46, § 162(7)(b).

If she’s on trial for Revenge Porn or CSAM, the only evidence she’ll be allowed for her defense is only going to be related to trying to prove beyond a reasonable doubt SHE DIDN’T upload those photos.

If criminal cases take so long, then why do I think she hasn’t gone while PHW might have?

Because she’s specifically said that she’s waiting on PHW.

Because he’s remained silent and is smart enough to shut his mouth. The accusers have run their mouth and are still active in the shenanigans of SocMed. That alone would sink any criminal case because she’s basically interfering with a police investigation at that point. She’d be hella dinged for that. Because nothing has happened, it makes me think she's just spouting hot air.

[timeofjuly]

Papyrus bonds to a murdery person who forced him to schedule a 30 minute meeting instead of spending the allotted week together after four days and he is like "aw you can have the smoke directly from my lungs if you're jonesing that bad." Bro!!! They want to wear your dust as eyeshadow!!! I love him

Hahaha, yeah, dude is hardcore barking up the second mage's tree. Literally take the air from my chest, it's fine, whatever you want, if you just slow down for a second and let me talk to you.

This ask actually made me go back and reread chapter three to make note of the reader's reactions to Papyrus. Interestingly, I actually think they fall in the flight camp rather than the fight/murdery one! Which is so at odds with both their initial reaction in the first chapter (going to FIGHT Papyrus as their immediate response to the bond snapping into place, then trying to FIGHT Sans during the encounter and being bamboozled when the option was missing) and with Sans' perception of them from chapter two as like, a walking talking yellow-robed promise of violence. I actually think Papyrus is the most honest person in the fic in terms of how truthful his narration is - everyone's unreliable ofc, including him, but the Second Mage can lie to themselves (and therefore us) in their internal monologue, but Paps is hooked up to the source lol. Like he says to them in the first chapter, they can't really lie to him.

What Papyrus is getting from the bond is more fear than anything - when he breaks the news about him feeling their emotions, that they've lost the only place left to them where they have any expectation of privacy, they panic and flee. Even after the nightmare, Papyrus notes that they're scared of him; their raw Intent tells him to get out, and tries to physically force him away, rather than attack or hurt him.

Which!! I think is interesting!! Because the reader has had literally nothing BUT rage and violence for so long that it's become their first response to every new obstacle that crosses their path, but they've been able to overcome those obstacles with that anger, right? Like, it's served them thus far. If it ain't broke, why fix it?

But Papyrus. The soulmate bond. That initial reaction, that safe, dependable response that's gotten them so far, doesn't work because they literally can't FIGHT him. They can't use their passion, their rage, their power, to break the bond. They can't play their winning hand. And that's scary! In their mind, their usually foolproof defense is useless, and they're already on the backfoot, because Papyrus has all the cultural knowledge re: the bond, and he's had four days of unchecked access into their head. They, certified Control Freak, have no control over the situation. And even though we (the audience) know that Papyrus isn't doing anything nefarious and that we can trust him, the Second Mage has zero reason to believe that. The opposite, really. But they can't do anything about it. Violence isn't an option. What's left to them but terror?

All this to say, I think the reader is more inclined to want to trap Papyrus under a glass and take him outside far, far away from them, à la a huge spider. But!! Sans, on the other hand? Now his dust would make a FANTASTIC smokey eye.

[hildred-rex]

Hello, I love Hildred Castaigne! He’s such a fucked up unreliable narrator and he also reminds me so much of myself in middle school and I love him for it. What do you like about him?

First off, apologies for taking absolutely ages to answer this! Life happened and I promptly forgot tumblr existed for almost a month. Yay.

Anyhow, I think my love of Hildred is a combination of the factors you mentioned and the absolute state I got into shortly after I found The King in Yellow -- aaand here comes an essay. The last version of this got deleted, and apparently I've taken it upon myself to make its replacement even lengthier.

Hildred is a fascinating character to read and to write, and his opinions on things are (or would be) so different from mine that it's fun to try to puzzle them out. I keep a bevy of fictional characters that I can simulate reasonably well as a way to make myself consider how people get to opinions that differ from mine, and naturally he's among them.

Beyond that, I'm an absolute sucker for hints at a greater world, but only narrow viewpoints from which to try to figure out what's going on in that world.

The weird bits of The King in Yellow as a whole are superb at tantalizing you with smug allusions and tiny scraps of information about what, exactly, it is that the book is named for.

Is it a play? Is it an entity? What happened to the author? ...was the author Boris? (I don't think the author was Boris, but I won't lie that I've considered writing a fic where he was.)

I got hooked on Lovecraft for the same reason, and it's actually what put me on to Arthur Machen (favorite author) and The King in Yellow (favorite book).

Even with all that, I think my King in Yellow interest would have been a passing thing that returned occasionally, if it hadn't been the last thing I got into before my first set of high school final exams kicked my ass.

The tl;dr of freshman year is that I picked the wrong math class and it spent the semester wrecking my self-confidence (and my sleep schedule) before I finally managed to transfer to a better one. (Then I spent second semester picking myself back up.)

Hildred, notably, is self-confident to the point of it backfiring catastrophically on him. He absolutely should not have gloated to Louis, tactically speaking; in this essay I will-

Anyway. Stress is weird, so during finals season and its leadup I had quite a lot of unmarshalled energy that refused to work on what I actually needed it to do and that instead directed itself at my idle pokings at Hildred and his world.

Probably better than worrying about how my abysmal math grade was going to ruin my life.

It didn't, and I came out of the crucible with rather extensive additional worldbuilding. Since I essentially speedran getting invested in the project, I came away wanting to do more of it and... it just kind of stuck?

I mean, here we are several years later and my first impulse is still to name my tumblr blog for him. I've got a rough idea of his extended family back three generations. I have a design for that spring suit Hawberk had that was mentioned exactly once. I am the embodiment of

when it comes to this lol

_____

I couldn't find a good place to fit this in above, but Hildred was also the first time I encountered a story with an obviously intentional unreliable narrator after I'd encountered the term. Not sure how I missed it that long, lol. I spent probably half a decade looking askance at various authors and going "...do you know what you're writing there???"

I also couldn't integrate it anywhere, but I absolutely adore "The Mask." I have Thoughts on Chambers's ability to write romance more generally, the short version being that he writes Lovers™ and not characters and they're thus so wooden they're hard to read, but that he must have been in a position like the beginning of "The Mask" because holy god that is exactly how it feels.

[bleachbleachbleach]

boring bleach larp

I know I've mentioned this multiple times before--at least once with pretty much this exact opener--but I cannot overstate how much Matsumoto means to my mental health lol.

Because when people can't make predetermined meetings and then ask for separate meetings to discuss things *I am not responsible for* and then DO NOT MAKE THE MEETING THEY THEMSELVES ASK FOR, my thought process is:

Q. Isn't it a little neoliberal of you to be this uptight about calendars? Would it be progressive and feminist to extend grace in this circumstance?

A. NO. RESPECT MY TIME, AS I DO.

Q. Well, knowing that this person is deeply unreliable and is never on time to the meetings she schedules, if she makes them at all, didn't you arrange your personal schedule so that this call would happen while you walked to a farm stand to pick up tomatoes? So you already anticipated and addressed the issue? And also now you have tomatoes?

A. I do now have tomatoes. But also NO I'M STILL MAD

Q. Would you be mad if this person were Matsumoto tho

A. ............ no i love her

[battlecriesandroses]

Maroon, scarlet, carmine, mahogany for the red asks, if you're still doing them :) ❤️

I AM thank you for asking!!

maroon: what role do you play in your group of friends?

i kind of have two different friend groups so i'll answer for both lol (both are really small with less than five people plus me, i just call them friend groups because group 2 are separated from group 1. jaye lore ig) in group 1 i'm both the dad friend and the mom friend. i like to think i'm pretty responsible so i always make sure everyone is all good. i also have a bag full of stuff like band aids and other amenities haha. in group 2 i really don't know who i am. i'm pretty quiet with those guys so i guess i could be like the guy on standby? that's what i'm going with. (great question!)

scarlet: think of your favourite genre. what kind of media in that genre do you prefer - books, films, or tv series?

this is SUCH an interesting question so i must give you a long-winded answer. i'm going to twist the question a little bit to what my favorite genre is in each of those mediums (i know i'm cheating but i'm in a big typing mood rn </3) for books this is really tough because i read a lot but i'm going to have to say contemporary/thriller. i have a lot of favorite books in all different genres but i often get attached to contemporaries. my favorite kinds of contemporaries are those with unreliable narrators because i think it adds a certain element to a story that i really enjoy. (i mentioned here i have a lot of favorite book genres; my second favorite is magical realism and my third favorite is science fiction.) my favorite types of movies are horror movies. i haven't read a lot of horror books but i have a hard time visualizing things sometimes so i think some elements of horror books get lost on me, on the other hand horror movies end up really spooking me due to a combination of music, images, and sound design. i'm also a fan of romance movies. i don't really have an answer for tv because i don't really watch a lot of it, my apologies.

carmine: do you prefer having or not having a schedule?

generally yeah. i'm really not a big fan of school but i love the structure that it gives to my every day life. in the summer i often forget what day it is haha.

scarlet: what is your favourite musical instrument, in terms of sound?

oooh this answer is pretty popular but for classical instruments i'm gonna have to say piano and violin. i am also very partial to the steel drum and sitar!

THANK YOU SO MUCH I LOVED THESE!!

[italeean]

Hi, would you mind sharing a little perspective about Benito Musolini (a prominant figure from Italy). I just learned about him at school, and when my teacher said he's from Italy, I immediately thinks of your account! Tbh My teacher haven't shared any facts about Musolini (He just mentioned that Musolini was a prominent figure from Italy w/o any further explanation). If you know something about him, please do share! I believe your explanation will be the most authentic (since you grew up and receive education in literally Italy) Thank you!! ... Also, Imagine if one day you stumbled upon a tickle fic with Musolini in it (as lee or ler) how would you feel about it? lol (this question is so random I'm sorry)

WARNING: SUPER LONG POST UNDER THE CUT

So... since you said you don't know any facts about this "person" and your teacher didn't do a great job at talking about him (he made him sound like a positive character from what you told me), I'll start with a little history lesson

WWI ended in 1918 with the victory of USA, England, France and Italy (who was initially allied with Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire). However, Italians didn't get what they wanted (like Istria) because they were labeled as "unreliable" for being allied with Austria and Germany before joining WWI on the other side. Basically, at the beginning, Italy "made friends" with Austria to get back the areas of Trento and Trieste from the Empire with diplomacy, but when the Great War broke out, they decided to take that land by force.

Anyway, being disrespected after winning the war caused a lot of discontent in the population, even among the younger ones (because yes, even 17-year-old guys had to go to war...). WWI was the first war to be fought with technological weapons and gas (mustard gas). Compared to the "romantic" kind of war, the one where there were heroes that distinguished themselves, this kind of war caused a much more significant psychological damage, also caused by the shell shock, and Italians felt like they were made fun of because they got injured, invalid or traumatized for nothing. This discontent is called "vittoria mutilata" (mutilated victory).

In this climate of economic crisis and deep instability, Benito Mussolini became popular with his complaints of how things were going and about the "vittoria mutilata". He even founded the movement of Fasci Italiani di Combattimento in 1919, which became PNF, or Partito Nazionale Fascista (Fascist National Party) in 1921, and the 28th of October 1922, he and his blackshirts (his followers, who got that name because they always wore black shirts) marched on Rome.

The king could have declared the state of siege and made the army intervene, but he let Mussolini do what he wanted, because he decided that Fascism was better than Communism (whose echoes were arriving from Russia, which would've officially become USSR 2 months later). However, dictatorship didn't arrive just like that. There were held elections... although they were basically not democratic and fascists "casually" won. Giacomo Matteotti investigated and was ready to present the evidence he had gathered to the Parliament, but the 10th of June 1924, the day before the scheduled presentation of said proof, he disappeared and was found dead.

I won't go into too much detail about his political maneuvers he took all the power with, I'll just focus on how his political choices affected the population.

1925: The government proclaims the Leggi Fascistissime (Ultra-Fascist Laws..?). With these laws, the President of the Council (Mussolini) became the Chief of the Government, every non-fascist political organization was disbanded, the police got more power and was free to act however they wanted (basically the George Floyd case was the normality here), censor was legalized and a Special Court was created to condemn people who were politically dangerous for the integrity of the government. Death penalty and exile were also reintroduced. The elections were extremely controlled: the government itself presented the list of candidates with no possibility of integration and the votes were made by applause in the squares (if it doesn't make sense, it's normal)

1926: Quota 90, it was an economic maneuver to give more value to Lira (Italian currency before Euro), which turned into a flop.

1929: Patti Lateranensi (Lateran Treaty). Basically it's an agreement between the Fascism and the Church to make sure religion doesn't intervene against Mussolini. In exchange, Catholicism becomes the State Religion and it also becomes a subject at school. This compromise with another authority and the presence of the king makes Fascism an imperfect totalitarianism because Mussolini, also known as Il Duce (The Leader, from Latin), wasn't the only authority in the country.

But what happens in the world? The crisis of 1929 hits the world and in 1933 Hitler wins the elections, democratically I think, and at Hindenburg's death in 1934 he also gets the position of President of Republic. The Nazi dictatorship begins.

In the beginning, Mussolini and Hitler aren't even interested in each other, they get closer only after some events.

1935: Italy invades Ethiopia with a scandalous war because Mussolini thinks Italy should have colonies as well, but the Society of Nations (UNO's ancestor) disapproves and Italy receives sanctions. In response to that, Il Duce decided to switch to the autarchic economy, which meant no more import-export and absolute self-sufficiency. Foreign words were banished from the vocabulary or were "italianized", and foreign drinks and foods were changed with Italian variations. For example, coffee was made with macerated chards. In this context of tensions with France and England, Mussolini got closer to Hitler.

1936: Civil war breaks out in Spain and Mussolini sends troops to help Francisco Franco, the soon-to-be dictator, take control of the nation.

1937: Italy joins the alliance between Germany and Japan (they became the Axis)

1938: The racist laws are proclaimed in Italy, following the example of the Nuremberg Laws of 1935, and antisemitism spreads in the nation. Some ghettos and concentration camps are also built, and you can still visit Fossoli.

1939: WW2 breaks out, but Italy still doesn't participate; Mussolini will join only a year later because, according to him "we needed a few hundreds of corpses to throw on the peace table". (Which meant we needed to sacrifice some soldiers to say "Hey, we participated, too! We want our share of whatever there is to gain!"). Let me tell you all this: we weren't ready for that war. Our equipments had never been upgraded since WWI and Italy always needed Hitler's help to finish any kind of war campaign that was started. Many people also died during the russian winter, which was brutal, and in the end we sided with the Allies when the US started the invasion (or the liberation) of Italy in 1943, after the arrest of Mussolini.

25/04/1945: The Allies finally free Italy from the Nazi-fascists (yes, the nazists had started the invasion of Italy the 8th of September 1943)

28/04/1945: Mussolini is found by someone partigiani (the ones who always made resistance to the fascism and even helped the Allies during the occupation of Italy) and gets shot.

After this ✨️not-so-amazing✨️ history lesson based on my knowledge from my years of high school, I'll share my opinions

I'm a progressist, so I'm very far from the extreme right political orientation

People still complain about how we are still under the influence of the US... guess what? If our Duce hadn't joined the war in 1940, we would've come out of this as honorable winners

My great grandfather nearly lost both his feet due to gangrene caused by the serious burns during the war in Ethiopia, a war than gave Italy nothing more than a stupid title

The only decent thing Mussolini did was La Battaglia del Grano (The Wheat Battle). He reclaimed some marshy areas and made them cultivated, but it was still insufficient for autarchy

Mussolini supported racism, which I absolutely do not believe in, censorship, authoritarianism, he forced Italians to be catholic, he punished people publicly by making them drink castor oil (a very strong purge)

The police or the blackshirts could come at your place and beat you to a pulp or even kill you if you were suspected of being against the regime

Women were given an economic incentive if they had children. The more babies they had, the bigger the incentive became. It meant that women were only supposed to be mothers, without being able to choose to remain single.

Homosexuals were directly dragged to the concentration camps

I don't wanna think about what happened to disabled people and kids during those ages...

Would you really think I'd want a world like this?

And would you think I'd ever read a fanfiction about such a shitty man?

And that's all I have to say 😸 I hope I didn't bore you all with this talk, but I felt like this was the bare minimum to make you all understand what Italy went through all these years, in a dictatorship that lasted 20 years.

Guys, just remember one thing: if you're going through a crisis in your country and a candidate to the leadership or someone who claims to be a rebel makes promises of making your country great, putting your own country above any other nation, restoring the economy in a short time or anything that sounds dreamy, they're probably fooling you. And by the way, if every country thought only for themselves, the world and the global society would probably collapse; also, I don't wanna live in a world of egoists so please, let's choose cooperation and integration over autarchy. I can guarantee that it brings no good in the long term.

I know yours was just curiosity, and I'm happy you asked me about this. Don't take my final questions as a sign of anger, I just think they are a good conclusion to this kind of talk 🥰

[mermaidsirennikita]

a quick review of Tiffany Reisz's The Saint, the sorta halfway point? Of this bizarre series? And probably my favorite so far

--as a true Wesley Hater, I was really hoping that Wesley going "ewwwwww no guy likes to eat his own semen out of a lady" and Nora being like "ahahahaha some do don't ask ahahaahaha" acted as a seed (haha) sown for a harvest I would reap, and I was so. so pleased. when Soren turned out to be one of those guys

--(Soren eats his own cum out of Nora... Nora mixes Nico's cum with wine and drinks it.... soul mate shit...)

--Nico is hot and lovely and a perfect sub/secondary partner for Nora, but I'll be real, you could't get me to give up fuckbuddy privileges with his dad for ANYTHING

--lol the weird thing about all that is that like... it really doesn't matter that Kingsley and Nora are done fucking... they're still tag team twins.... they're still sucking the same guy off on the reg.... it's all a wash........ literally...........

--the audacity of that man successfully defending not one but two dissertations while caring for and training a very bratty submissive, languishing in unresolved love and lust with his BFF, keeping up a busy schedule as local top dom, aAAAAND tending to a flock

--I find the usage of the unreliability really effective in this series; younger Nora thinks she'll never want to leave Soren and she truly believes it; Kingsley tells the reader Soren doesn't love him because he believes it; Soren tells Nora that he was a born sadist and dominant when like... the unimaginable trauma he was raised into was....... clearly.......... the actual issue there.................. and Nora just is like "yep Soren is always right" because she loves him and worships him

--the audacity of that bitch writing all his names down in a hard copy letter to Nora and discussing being inside her in the same sentence then using his incognito signature like that. will. help.

--Nora should've known he was in love with her when she handed him her erotic AU where he's Xerxes and she's Queen Esther and he went "this is brilliant satire and better than anything I've ever written"

[melancholiepeufiable]

hello!

i know it's been some time since the final renaissance update, but it impacted me a lot and i needed to collect my thoughts,, so, sorry if this is a very late contribution to the debate. also obligatory warning that i am not a native speaker so my explanations might be a little wonky at times hahshd

to say it plainly: i sobbed, i laughed, i trembled and i melted with this fic. it had the perfect dose of everything; of pain, doubts, things being broken and then fixed with enough love and understanding that it reeked through the screen into my feelings as well. and you got my heart racing with every update!! my week revolved around your scheduled updates, however crazy that sounds.

like you said, it was cathartic. and painful. god, my heart ached so much every single time charles doubted himself and seb's view on him, and it ached when he longed for something as human as love with such resentment towards himself. but in the end, your brilliant writing soothed me like - pardon my perhaps nonsensical comparisons - those rays of sunlight in winter, when you've been freezing outside and they hit the skin of your hands and for a moment you think, wow, there is something more to this than just suffering. your writing style evoked such vivid emotions in me i thought i might be one with charles, lol. i love it, love it, love it.

you helped me realise a lot about myself in the process of reading too - and again, i am sorry for this little oversharing, but you also helped me realise that just like charles found out in the end, getting help might be worth it, and i will be getting it. it probably seems insincere,, but yeah. i am being genuine. your take on daddy issues hurt in a way where you realise that, damn, this is too realistic and hits too close to home, unlike those glorified scenarios on certain social media. bravo.

while i'm here, i would also like to mention that i read your other works, rouge et blanc and act of god. the latter in particular made it hard to breathe at times - not in the anxiety way, but in the in-awe-thanks-to-the-genius-storytelling way. you have this skill of uniting the reader and the main character to the point where they think alike, and it was only in the end when i noticed the escalation of the obsessive elements, that's how immersed i was in seb's unreliable narration. bravo again. (also, the religious imagery? chef's fucking kiss good LORD)

i don't want to go into detail over specific scenes in renaissance because this would be even longer than it is, so i'm just gonna wrap it up by saying: please, if you can, keep creating!! i don't mean it as putting pressure on you, the thing i want to say is that your art is absolutely brilliant and loved, if you ever doubt it. thank you for creating this fic and i am soo looking forward to anything you create in the future!!

-diem

hi anon ❤️

dw about it being late! my own reply is late as well haha, sorry (also dw about the english, you’re perfectly fine).

aw shucks, thank you so much. it’s always so lovely to see how much a work can reach someone, and to hear how it is has affected you is simultaneously joyous and tear-jerking (sorry about the pain it caused).

ahhh i love love LOVE that comparison to the sunlight during winter. might be one of my favourite compliments ever! it’s always sooooo pleasing for a writer to know that the reader is experiencing things almost as if they were the character themselves. thank you!

getting help is absolutely nothing to be shameful of, and i’m so proud of you going to get it. i wish you the best ❤️ (thank you again! i didn’t want the father complex to be dramatised bc in reality, it’s a lot different than what’s shown on tv).

ahhh and you read the others??? thank you omg! haha, thank you for liking act of god sm, i’m so happy that the general consensus has been positive. i was so nervous to post it, but i’m glad the religious imagery and seb’s unreliability managed to get through to the reader.

yes!! i will keep creating as soon as i get out of the writer’s block. i’m so grateful for your message and the support. have a great day! all the love <3

[heyharoldsboo]

But if they had tried to extort him, wouldnt he have come out to say so??Like that is pretty damning proof if he has it no? Extorsion would have made no one belive th anymore. But maybe he spoke to them on the phone and dumbass didnt record it lol? If it was actually extorsion he would have probably known in advance this was coming but it looks like he had no idea because he was in Paris and how could they have known this was gonna blow up? I dont know im just thinking out loud now

Okay, so keep in mind that I have watched all the James Bond movies and I love cop tv shows. Because this is this kind of crazy. I'll admit to it.

But hear me out.

The only people still believing in it are the haters. Everyone else either believes him or doesn't care. If he talks and says "oh, I was extorted" he needs to take these people to court. Just putting it out there for the public opinion could make him be accused by the haters of trying to either manipulate the narrative or of lying.

If they were trying to extort him - and what makes me believe this is one screenshot that one girl says "I can tell you who to call to make this all go away" or something like this. Why would they give him this way out? They wanted something out of this.

So, let's say they were extorting him and he wasn't giving them what they wanted - he couldn't just hide. Life had to go on as usual, or they'd know and throw it all in the internet. So he went to Paris, did the scheduled pap walk with Jenna and Georgie, a little sightseeing and then YSL. You can see him a lot on his phone during the pap walk, and he's uncharacteristically jittery during the show. It's very different from the way he presented himself at the Gucci show in Milan. And things exploded the next day, so that makes me think that he knew at least a little time beforehand that it'd blow up.

So, thank you for listening to my ramblings! It's all speculation, and based on a unreliable source of a screenshot.

[troybarnesbucky]

Hi! Anxiety, stress, and a change in sleep schedule have all moved my period over the years. I do recommend taking a pregnancy test if your anxiety is likely to spike over this, but considering the environment and the recent move you mentioned AND the fact that you only recently (?) Stopped taking the pill (which means your hormones could only now be settling) (yes it can take a few months) your period being a little (or a lot, I used to skip whole months if I didn't get enough sleep) late could just be human bodies being unreliable.

(I apologize if this message is annoying or overreaching, I just have similar anxiety around missed/delayed periods and thought maybe hearing a similar experiences could maybe help)

i got off the pill 5-6 months ago i don’t remember but i’ve been SUPER consistent up until now which is why i’m worried. it also would be extremely odd if i were pregnant bc my bf and i have been doing long distance and only saw each other once (on my last period lol). so i know logically it would be very odd if i were pregnant but literally who knows. human bodies are funny like that.

that being said, yes i have been super stressed w/ moving back and starting my job. i’ve also been way more active than usual, so that could explain it. i used to have very inconsistent periods so it could be that now that i’m off the pill, my body is like “we back bitch!” but who knows?? my anxiety has been pretty bad but tbh not the worst it’s ever been. i do remember before i was on the pill my period being less consistent during the summers so maybe that’s it? i love overthinking <3

i’m gonna give it another day or two before i’m officially Late and if i still don’t have my period i’ll take a test.

also it was v sweet of you to message me because i’m driving my bf bananas with how much i’m overthinking this so i appreciate you 🫶🏻