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sugar-petals · 4 years ago

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When I look at yuzuru he strikes me as a really soft cutesy charming etheral individual not really homme fatal kind of guy that's why I think he's pure romantic rather than TR what do u think? ( love you btw)

i’ve been thinking about it as well, but it’s not a crystal clear case. he’s a sportsman, skating morphs the body in the most uncommon ways which makes it harder to narrow down the type.

basics first so we get the foundations right: pinpointing the kibbe category he is + isn’t and why, the subtype after.

1. which one of the big 5?

- safe to say, yes: he’s somewhere in the romantic category. nobody does these outfits quite like yuzu. light fabrics, intricate embellishments, he is famous for all that gorgeous princely tailoring. the sport is all about the sequins, he definitely shines in them. every professional figure skating photographer out there will tell you that he hits different and you can see why.

WOW.

i’ve witnessed people complaining that the glitz and glam no longer suits his age, he gets scorn for not dressing traditionally masculine, but i don’t know how it wouldn’t look appropriate. the only valid criticism is that it’s often a hit or miss, but we’d be damned if this isn’t what an ice prince looks like.

he’s the best in the world and his main goal is to put on a show. rolling up in a polo shirt would contradict the objective, being an allround artist first and only then a jump technician. he’s exactly how you’d expect a yuzuru hanyu to look like. if you appear ‘like yourself’, it’s the right kibbe category.

R clothing typically has a sexy edge as well, you can’t put a kid into that. cut out cleavage, transparent, figure-hugging, no way. if anything, most R styles seemed all over the place when yuzu was younger (this is from 2010). yin is meant to be tailored for adults to begin with, you can’t make it teenage gamine.

eleven years later at 26, yuzuru hanyu in 2021, adult man, wearing the hell out of a skating gala outfit. this would be tacky on someone any younger. R is not just light and sweet but also dignified and mature. long story short. he’s grown into a yin-dominant type. fits to a T, a feast for the eye.

- meanwhile: you can easily exclude dramatic. very thick, stable fabrics with large lines are gigantic on him. D clothing is a yuzu charm killer, figures because it’s the type opposite to romantic (pure yang). it washes out the face and is twice as wide as his frame is, bulks out around the shoulders.

- not a natural type either, it feels a bit too simple, underchallenging. ruffled hair appears dishevelled where it’d be just right on a natural. it doesn’t fully highlight him: natural looks aren’t the most memorable on yuzuru even if they tend to be rather neutral and don’t look too off per se, it has a bit of draping after all.

he looks really good in the below outfit, but his frame doesn’t fill it out. he’s all elegant underneath and radiates ballet while N is a rough, easy-going, and leisurely concept for very bulky frames. the waist gets missing in translation, the mid-section of shirts like these is too wide.

- not a gamine either. he might appear like one and i deliberated back and forth whether he is Pure G or FG, but the material mix, line breaks, and fashion experiments are creating chaos rather than something put-together. it just isn’t as flattering as when he does drapes and florals. the hair being cropped (typical gamine cut) often obfuscates the face. G styles are confusing on yuzu.

his skating is from outer space but this is probably a bit too galactical 😅

- not a classic. something’s not right, suits like these contrast a lot with how round his face is and sit on his body very randomly. missing waist again (yin). the same people who want him to dress more conservatively/masculine have been roasting yuzu for looking like a salary man in that style 🤔 i sense hypocrisy. in any case, classic underwhelms, he’s made to dress up. more points to yin, he he’s too petite to wear C.

now, we got the main category down, time for subtyping. romantic has two options.

2. which romantic?

arguments in favor of Theatrical Romantic:

this type is what he often portrays in the rink (e.g. the phantom of the opera programme) and has become his secret weapon. whether that speaks of his true type is the question. what i mean is, he can pull it off, the seductive homme fatale. compare jimin, people lose their minds over theatrical romantic men. yuzu is in that lane as well.

as in, balance of main yin with a yang undercurrent — the very gentle, princely young man with the soft face who gathers everyone’s hearts, and he is a damn flirt on ice, but who can give a very visceral, dark performance. that shows a tremendous fervor and an edge, with an athletic and taut body.

he does have some yang elements to his physicality. streamlined silhouette, some narrowness, extreme flat muscle, long triangular upper body, some vertical line. also — his color palette (aka skin undertone, cool v warm, hue, chroma, deepness etc) might match TR. on the other hand, it might simply be the black hair giving him the contrast for it.

the reason why we might get the TR impression is that he often wears all black which suggests dramatic, and the athleticism in his profession has trained away the chubbiness he might naturally have. the face as the only part that won’t be somehow affected by his routine is all yin.

arguments in favor of pure Romantic:

... as you pointed out. in private life and backstage, he is quite effortlessly sweet- and small-looking. with the delicacy and doe-eyedness you’d expect from pure romantic, very unlike his performance persona.

if you didn’t know he’s copyrighted BDE on the ice, yuzu seems like he can’t harm a fly, round rosy bean he is. he makes a very innocent and soft 1st impression in candids which no other type except soft gamine does.

facial features, all opposite of yang. not long, not sharp, not planar, not angular, not bony, not narrow. the button nose, full lips, and puffy cheeks is all you see. you’d not think of him as striking (=D, FN).

that’s also why he’s always pitted as nathan chen’s opposite in whatever he does. nate is on the other end of the kibbe spectrum, people probably don’t even realize that their physical lines are contrasting archetypes. it’s subconsciously part of why people can construct such a rivalry.

study nathan’s face and it becomes apparent. very oblong shape, flat-laying flesh and an asymmetric jaw that couldn’t be any more prominent (=yang). the brows and eyes create a powerful horizontal unlike yuzu’s more wide-set puppy eyes. the nose is longer, the ears, too. nathan looks sharp, piercing, and intimidating rather than soft. you see the exact outline of the bone.

with him, you assume the reverse of what people think of yuzu at first glance. if you didn’t know that nathan couldn’t be any nerdier, you’d believe he’s 1000% jock-off-the-charts. how he has a lot of yang contributed to his on-ice image, too. one’s kibbe type can shape life choices since people see you in a certain way simply based on your lines.

how yuzu is such a visual difference to nathan further points to how he’s closer to pure yin: rather than a subtype that picks up elements from dramatic. otherwise, you’d see some of that angularity. but no: roundness over structure, you see the flesh, not frame. you couldn’t call him a jock by all means 😆

you won’t see that chiseled geometry and crazy jawline/browline. as you say he’s more cutesy, and a charmer, the whole fandom will agree. pure romantics have everyone wrapped around their fingers (and their booty lmao!) because you want to pepper them with kisses, yin types all look so non-threatening and beautiful. ethereal is the right word.

and they’re the sexiest ofc, since they’re curvy. R got hips.

sigh... this type is a showstopper. what to do with him. he can beam at ya or he can sway his hips at ya, another unsuspecting hanyu interessee falls for the guy. he does the prince concept and the sexy cutie alike.

he tries to convince us otherwise 😂

sexy aside, he looks great in the respective clothing recs, with waist emphasis and rounded edges. kimonos are often soft dramatic or natural-inspired, but it works out well this way. and again: romantic is not childish/playful clothing of some kind, it can be very official and deliberate.

rather than in edge tailoring which is very loose around his arms and does yuzu no justice. that’s actually the kind of clothing that makes him appear either younger or older depending on if it’s D or C.

TLDR - he might not seem completely yin in his appearance, but that’s because of his excessive sports regimen. since yuzu has been training since he was a kid, we never saw how he’d normally be. he rocks the pure romantic regardless and it’s likely it’s his kibbe type. him wearing R is always a spectacle.

bonus kibbe meme: yuzu, photoshopped to the moon and back, wearing soft dramatic for a toothpaste ad. amazing.

#kibbe #kibbe body types #yuzuru hanyu #kibbe types #figure skating #cub mail 🐆#anon #ask #long post #yuzuru hayu thread

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weyassinebentalb · 3 years ago

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Gaza Conflict Stokes 'Identity Crisis' for Young American Jews

Dan Kleinman does not know quite how to feel.

As a child in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, he was taught to revere Israel as the protector of Jews everywhere, the “Jewish superman who would come out of the sky to save us” when things got bad, he said.

It was a refuge in his mind when white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, chanted “Jews will not replace us,” or kids in college grabbed his shirt, mimicking a “South Park” episode to steal his “Jew gold.”

But his feelings have grown muddier as he has gotten older, especially now as he watches violence unfold in Israel and Gaza. His moral compass tells him to help the Palestinians, but he cannot shake an ingrained paranoia every time he hears someone make anti-Israel statements.

“It is an identity crisis,” Kleinman, 33, said. “Very small in comparison to what is happening in Gaza and the West Bank, but it is still something very strange and weird.”

As the violence escalates in the Middle East, turmoil of a different kind is growing across the Atlantic. Many young American Jews are confronting the region’s long-standing strife in a very different context, with very different pressures, from their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

The Israel of their lifetime has been powerful, no longer appearing to some to be under constant existential threat. The violence comes after a year when mass protests across the United States have changed how many Americans see issues of racial and social justice. The pro-Palestinian position has become more common, with prominent progressive members of Congress offering impassioned speeches in defense of the Palestinians on the House floor. At the same time, reports of anti-Semitism are rising across the country.

Divides between some American Jews and Israel’s right-wing government have been growing for more than a decade, but under the Trump administration those fractures that many hoped would heal became a crevasse. Politics in Israel have also remained fraught, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s long-tenured government forged allegiances with Washington. For young people who came of age during the Trump years, political polarization over the issue only deepened.

Many Jews in America remain unreservedly supportive of Israel and its government. Still, the events of recent weeks have left some families struggling to navigate both the crisis abroad and the wide-ranging response from American Jews at home. What is at stake is not just geopolitical, but deeply personal. Fractures are intensifying along lines of age, observance and partisan affiliation.

In suburban Livingston, New Jersey, Meara Ashtivker, 38, has been afraid for her father-in-law in Israel, who has a disability and is not able to rush to the stairwell to shelter when he hears the air-raid sirens. She is also scared as she sees people in her progressive circles suddenly seem anti-Israel and anti-Jewish, she said.

Ashtivker, whose husband is Israeli, said she loved and supported Israel, even when she did not always agree with the government and its actions.

“It’s really hard being an American Jew right now,” she said. “It is exhausting and scary.”

Some young, liberal Jewish activists have found common cause with Black Lives Matter, which explicitly advocates for Palestinian liberation, concerning others who see that allegiance as anti-Semitic.

The recent turmoil is the first major outbreak of violence in Israel and Gaza for which Aviva Davis, who graduated this spring from Brandeis University, has been “socially conscious.”

“I’m on a search for the truth, but what’s the truth when everyone has a different way of looking at things?” Davis said.

Alyssa Rubin, 26, who volunteers in Boston with IfNotNow, a network of Jewish activists who want to end Jewish American support for Israeli occupation, has found protesting for the Palestinian cause to be its own form of religious observance.

She said she and her 89-year-old grandfather ultimately both want the same thing, Jewish safety. But “he is really entrenched in this narrative that the only way we can be safe is by having a country,” she said, while her generation has seen that “the inequality has become more exacerbated.”

In the protest movements last summer, “a whole new wave of people were really primed to see the connection and understand racism more explicitly,” she said, “understanding the ways racism plays out here, and then looking at Israel/Palestine and realizing it is the exact same system.”

But that comparison is exactly what worries many other American Jews, who say the history of white American slaveholders is not the correct frame for viewing the Israeli government or the global Jewish experience of oppression.

At Temple Concord, a Reform synagogue in Syracuse, New York, teenager after teenager started calling Rabbi Daniel Fellman last week, wondering how to process seeing Black Lives Matter activists they marched with last summer attack Israel as “an apartheid state.”

“The reaction today is different because of what has occurred with the past year, year and a half, here,” Fellman said. “As a Jewish community, we are looking at it through slightly different eyes.”

Nearby at Sha’arei Torah Orthodox Congregation of Syracuse, teenagers were reflecting on their visits to Israel and on their family in the region.

“They see it as Hamas being a terrorist organization that is shooting missiles onto civilian areas,” Rabbi Evan Shore said. “They can’t understand why the world seems to be supporting terrorism over Israel.”

In Colorado, a high school senior at Denver Jewish Day School said he was frustrated at the lack of nuance in the public conversation. When his social media apps filled with pro-Palestinian memes last week, slogans like “From the river to the sea” and “Zionism is a call for an apartheid state,” he deactivated his accounts.

“The conversation is so unproductive, and so aggressive, that it really stresses you out,” Jonas Rosenthal, 18, said. “I don’t think that using that message is helpful for convincing the Israelis to stop bombing Gaza.”

Compared with their elders, younger American Jews are overrepresented on the ends of the religious affiliation spectrum: a higher share are secular, and a higher share are Orthodox.

Ari Hart, 39, an Orthodox rabbi in Skokie, Illinois, has accepted the fact that his Zionism makes him unwelcome in some activist spaces where he would otherwise be comfortable. College students in his congregation are awakening to that same tension, he said. “You go to a college campus and want to get involved in anti-racism or social justice work, but if you support the state of Israel, you’re the problem,” he said.

Hart sees increasing skepticism in liberal Jewish circles over Israel’s right to exist. “This is a generation who are very moved and inspired by social justice causes and want to be on the right side of justice,” Hart said. “But they’re falling into overly simplistic narratives, and narratives driven by true enemies of the Jewish people.”

Overall, younger American Jews are less attached to Israel than older generations: About half of Jewish adults under 30 describe themselves as emotionally connected to Israel, compared with about two-thirds of Jews over age 64, according to a major survey published last week by the Pew Research Center.

And though the U.S. Jewish population is 92% white, with all other races combined accounting for 8%, among Jews ages 18 to 29 that rises to 15%.

In Los Angeles, Rachel Sumekh, 29, a first-generation Iranian American Jew, sees complicated layers in the story of her own Persian family. Her mother escaped Iran on the back of a camel, traveling by night until she got to Pakistan, where she was taken in as a refugee. She then found asylum in Israel. She believes Israel has a right to self-determination, but she also found it “horrifying” to hear an Israeli ambassador suggest other Arab countries should take in Palestinians.

“That is what happened to my people and created this intergenerational trauma of losing our homeland because of hatred,” she said.

The entire situation feels too volatile and dangerous for many people to even want to discuss, especially publicly.

Violence against Jews is increasingly close to home. Last year the third-highest number of anti-Semitic incidents in the United States were recorded since the Anti-Defamation League began cataloging them in 1979, according to a report released by the civil rights group last month. The ADL recorded more than 1,200 incidents of anti-Semitic harassment in 2020, a 10% increase from the previous year. In Los Angeles, the police are investigating a sprawling attack on sidewalk diners at a sushi restaurant Tuesday as an anti-Semitic hate crime.

Outside Cleveland, Jennifer Kaplan, 39, who grew up in a modern Orthodox family and who considers herself a centrist Democrat and a Zionist, remembered studying abroad at Hebrew University in 2002, and being in the cafeteria minutes before it was bombed. Now she wondered how the Trump era had affected her inclination to see the humanity in others, and she wished her young children were a bit older so she could talk with them about what is happening.

“I want them to understand that this is a really complicated situation, and they should question things,” she said. “I want them to understand that this isn’t just a, I don’t know, I guess, utopia of Jewish religion.”

Esther Katz, the performing arts director at the Jewish Community Center in Omaha, Nebraska, has spent significant time in Israel. She also attended Black Lives Matter protests in Omaha last summer and has signs supporting the movement in the windows of her home.

She has watched with a sense of betrayal as some of her allies in that movement have posted online about their apparently unequivocal support for the Palestinians, and compared Israel to Nazi Germany. “I’ve had some really tough conversations,” said Katz, a Conservative Jew. “They’re not seeing the facts, they’re just reading the propaganda.”

Her three children, who range in age from 7 to 13, are now wary of a country that is for Katz one of the most important places in the world. “They’re like, ‘I don’t understand why anyone would want to live in Israel, or even visit,’” she said. “That breaks my heart.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

source https://www.techno-90.com/2021/05/gaza-conflict-stokes-identity-crisis.html

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storytelling-101 · 4 years ago

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Character Development — Part E

Mental Information is essential to know what goes on in the head of your characters. It helps you to find out how they will react in certain situations. Of course, sometimes characters write themselves as the story progresses. But at times you’ll probably find yourself stuck and in that case it is helpful to have something to go back to and find a clue as to resolve your problem. Also, since Mental Information and Emotional Information are really close to each other in terms of the source, I will cover them both in this post.

Mental Information

Type of Childhood How did the character grow up? Were they sheltered, neglected, or often scolded? How we are brought up shapes us to a great extent, so if your character had i.e. a really tough childhood, then there are surely some problems that will arise for them as an adult.

Education Self-explanatory. How far did they advance in their studies? Did they only compulsory education (however far this is in your specific story), did they go to university? Maybe they were completely home-tutored for some reason?

Dream Job as a Child This point is mostly for fun, but can also can come in handy at some time. What job did your character dream of as a child? It can be casually mentioned in a conversation but can also be a starting point for a job change of your character.

Personality as a Child Of course, no one is going to be the same as an adult as they were as a child. But we often keep our most prominent characteristics even if we grow up. So, to keep it reasonable, you could list three adjectives that are describe your character's character as a child.

Favorite Place as a Child A favorite place as a child, which could be anything, can induce a sense of nostalgia and sometimes even a sense of peace of mind in a character. This point could be a place they go to i.e. if they need to be alone or when they need to think.

Hobbies in Their Childhood As with the personality, hobbies from our childhood sometimes tend to stay with us even as we advance to adulthood. This point is more of a device to compare the child and teenager/adult character.

Role Models Who were their role models in their childhood? Role models often shape the way we view the world or who we strive to become. i.e. if someone's parent is a doctor and also their role model, as a child, it is not exactly uncommon that this child would dream to be a doctor as well. Even if that can change while growing up.

Past Regret What event in the past did they regret the most? What has been such a huge blow to them that they'd travel back in time to change it?

Major Turning Point Which event in their childhood hat the greatest impact on them? This could be, for example, someone who firmly believed he would be able to save the world realizing that he is actually powerless.

Earliest Memory (*) Really self-explanatory. What is the earliest thing in their life they remember prior to the beginning of your story? This can also be a vague memory, it hasn't to be clear up to the tiniest detail.

Saddest Memory (*) As above. What is the saddest memory they have from before the story started? This can be, depending on the age of your character, i.e. the death of a loved one, a friend who moved away, a failed entrance exam, etc.

Happiest Memory (*) Also self-explanatory. What was their happiest memory up until now? This is great to be used in comparison. For example, the wedding day is said to be the happiest day in her life for a woman (yes, I know this is mostly cliché), so it could be used in a comparison like "…, I felt even happier than on my wedding day."

Clearest Memory (*) Same as above. What memory does your character remember the most vividly? This would be a memory they remember even to the smallest details like the exact time, the facial expressions of the people involved, etc.

Advice to Their Younger Self If they could somehow give advice to their younger self, what would it be? What would they want their younger self to know or to do differently?

Practical Advice Who do they turn to for practical advice? Which person around them is most qualified to give them advice to solve their problems?

Mentoring Who do they look for when they feel stuck in their life? Who is most likely to give them tips regarding their life?

Emotional Support If they feel overwhelmed or confused by their emotions, who is the person they would depend on?

Moral Support Which person would the character turn to if they feel their morals being compromised?

Personality Type This can actually be anything you could think of. Pick a synonym you can relate to the most. For example, you could put nouns like bully/saint/jock/… in here or adjectives like shy/overbearing/active/…

Type of Knowledge What do they know the most about and where did the character acquire their knowledge? i.e. someone who only reads books and never socialized with people will probably know a lot of things you can learn from books, but will have problems interacting with other people and reading the atmosphere/understanding their emotions/…

Outlook on Life Rather simple: are they an optimist or pessimist?

Attitude Toward Politics Rather self-explanatory as well. Are they interested in politics? Maybe they are indifferent to them? Do they actively take part in it? This is often relevant in fantasy stories.

Criminal Record Do they have a criminal record? What did they do? Where they put into prison for it? Is the character at risk of committing the same crime again?

Biggest Accomplishment What do they feel is the greatest accomplishment of their life prior to the beginning of the story? This can be anything from getting rid of their bad habits to saving a country.

Biggest Flaw Same as above. What does the character think is their biggest flaw? Is it the same that others would name?

Current Favorite Place As with the Favorite Place as a Child, this can be any place you want. It can act as a safe haven or a place they would bring their significant other.

Current Favorite Sound This point also seems very random, but it can also tell a lot about a person. For example, someone who prefers the quite might be someone who tends to solitary or who's life is so hectic that they need the quiet to balance out their stressful (and probably loud) everyday life.

Secrets What do they keep a secret? This, too, can be anything from certain hobbies to a crime they committed.

Skeletons in the Closet In contrast to the point above, this point covers secrets that they don't want to be found out no matter what. So, what secret(s) would they take to their grave?

Ambition Is your character ambitious? If they are, are they keeping it in moderation or are they overdoing it? And if not, are they belittling people for being ambitious?

Power Does your character place importance in power? Do they have power or do they want to achieve it? Would they be the type to abuse their power?

Love How do they approach love? Is it important to them or do they tend to push it aside? Are they awkward in handling love or are they confident?

Change How does your character handle change? Do they adapt to it well and go with the flow? Or are they completely thrown off and crumble under the sudden need to re-adjust?

Mental Illnesses Self-explanatory. Does your character have any mental illnesses? If yes, you can go into more detail here. If not, you could note down if they are understanding of the topic or maybe regard it as ridiculous because it is something that cannot be seen.

Favorite Quote Also self-explanatory. What is their favorite quote? Which sentence has inspired them? Or maybe, which quote did the character find pleasing to the ear? This can be anything that suits the character

Morals How strong is their moral compass? Do they stick to their morals even in difficult situations? Or do they maybe compromise? A good example of this would be a quote from the classic movie Star Trek III – The Wrath of Khan. "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. Or the one." So, taking this into consideration, the example for compromising would be someone who is completely opposed to killing, but would readily kill someone who threatens the life of many (people important to them).

Pet Peeves What rubs your character the wrong way? This point overlaps a bit with Anger, but in this case it doesn't necessarily need to induce anger. They could also trigger confusion, annoyance, and the like.

Compliments How do they handle compliments? Do they often get some? And do the compliment others? If they do, do they get flustered themselves? What is the best/nicest compliment they ever received?

Goals What do they want to achieve? This can be a short-term or a long-term goal and as small or big as you see fit. This point can also act as the starting point for your story.

Motivation What spurred them on to pursue their goal in the first place? Do they have motivation in general or do they lack it?

Dreams What does your character dream of? This can be any kind of dream, i.e., a happy family, a stable job, a big house, etc.

(*) = This, of course, excludes cases of people who suffer from any kind of amnesia or any other memory-related illness.

Emotional Information

Greatest Desire What do they want most in their life? Here goes whatever the character wants to achieve the most. This could be anything you could think of: Money, fame, power, love, etc.

Biggest Fear What does your character fear the most in the entire world? This doesn’t necessarily need to be a fear of a certain type of animal, etc., but can also be a very specific fear. i.e., for a passionate artist, what they fear the most would probably to lose their ability to create something in their specific field like art/music/…

Humor Here goes what makes them laugh. You can list either specific things/situations or keep it generic, like they laugh about anti-jokes, slapstick, etc.

Indifference What does your character not care about? This point isn’t about not hating something but about the things that induce absolutely no emotion in them.

Anger Rather self-explanatory. What makes them angry? This can be really anything, from dog-eared pages to violence against defenseless people.

Sadness The same as above. What makes them sad? This can also be general or specific situations. Be careful though, because people can, for example, cry because they see other people crying, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the person also feels sad. Something like that is most likely due to empathy.

Happiness Also self-explanatory. What makes your character happy? Don’t add too much to this point, though. As with sadness, people can be pleased about things but don’t necessarily need to feel real happiness about it. i.e., I would be pleased if the gap between rich and poor would shrink, but it’s not like I would feel genuine happiness because of that, since it wouldn’t affect me directly.

Most Important Possession A comparison I like to use for this point is a widely known one: If you moved to an uninhabited island and would only be allowed to take three items with you, what would it be? Or, if this is too abstract for some, what would the character rescue from their burning home if they could only take three things?

Days Alone at Home This seems like a random point, but can say a lot about a person. If they spend one or multiple days at home, completely alone, what would the character do? The answer not only shows if the character is capable of living without socializing for some time, but also shows if they can entertain themselves. It tells a lot about which role a character would take in a group.

Greatest Need Please don’t confuse this with the point Greatest Desire. What someone needs isn’t necessarily something they want. It is, for example, an emotion their life is void of even though they don’t realize it. Or it could be something that would better them as a person in any way. If I had to give a rather extreme example: Someone who grew up without knowing love probably won’t directly miss it even as an adult. But that wouldn’t mean that they don’t need it, because not knowing love also means that they most likely don’t show care or compassion for others.

Mental and Emotional Information are both very vast fields and you could expanded indefinitely. I think, though, these points are the most necessary ones. Next time we will cover the last points, namely Social Information.

#Writing Tips #Writing Experience #Writing Help #Storytelling #Story Building #Story Bible #Character Development #Character Creation #Character Sheets #Mental Information #Emotional Information

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euhande · 4 years ago

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⟨ SIMAY BARLAS. CIS FEMALE. SHE/HER. ⟩ though the mist might prevent some from seeing it, HANDE DEMIR is actually a descendent of A R E S. it’s still a question of whether or not the TWENTY-TWO year old PRE-LAW MAJOR from ÜBERLINGEN, GERMANY has taken after their godly parent completely, but the demigod is still known to be quite AMBITIOUS & ABRASIVE.

BACKGROUND

hande’s mother is a highly accomplished aerospace engineering graduate from one of berlin’s premiere universities, having worked for various defense companies as a missile specialist since graduating with her master’s degree. she may basically be a rocket scientist, but it’s not rocket science to figure out why ares was attracted to her 😉

they began a tumultuous, on-and-off again relationship that would last for 5 years, and it was only when hande was born that ares dropped the bomb on her mother that monsters were going to try and eat their baby, so she better buckle the fuck up and get ready to raise a demigod

that was the essentially the ending of their relationship — ares became an absent father the way most greek gods are, intermittently sending birthday cards every few years but often getting the dates wrong. she can count on one hand the amount of times she’s met him in-person outside of being a baby, while her mother has been a constant (if sometimes suffocating) presence in her life. she wouldn’t say much about hande’s father when prompted by baby hande, just that he was an asshole and didn’t deserve to meet her, which, fair

from the time she entered kindergarten, it was obvious that she was highly intelligent but had, to put it mildly, explosive behavior problems that would routinely disrupt class time. students were constantly picking fights with her for reasons beyond the teachers’ comprehension, often times materializing from thin air or being an extreme overreaction for typical kid teasing and shenanigans.

schools didn’t know what to do with her. they tried claiming she had emotional problems, they tried moving classrooms, moving schools, and nothing worked. it wasn’t until she was eleven that she was found by a satyr and encouraged into joining a demigod camp over the summer, so that she would be able to control what was undoubtedly emerging odikinesis

that same year, her mother found a higher-paying work opportunity and relocated them to a small city near the swiss border called überlingen, which is home to a prominent defense company that manufactures, you guessed it, missiles. it was a shit ton of change coming from both mortal and demigod sides at hande, and she was resentful of her mother for years for hiding such a crucial fact from her... nevertheless, she was grateful she had a chance to start fresh in a new place and was able to explore the demigod side of herself at the demigod camp in athens

it was pretty obvious she was a child of ares, but she wasn’t claimed until she punched a boy in the teeth for harassing her and knocked out a couple of his teeth. iconic queen.

an elite german boarding school nearby was where she attended mortal school, admitted fully on her merits (the discipline record was conveniently covered up by the mist), but it’s not like she could magically wish away her powers and function as a normal mortal in school. she had a shaky control of her odikinesis up until she was a teenager, and would often provoke other people in her grade, both accidentally and on purpose. she gained a reputation among her school as one of the more... well-known residents, and while she graduated without getting into a fist fight (on school grounds, that is), she also graduated with no friends.

eonia university was the logical place for her to attend college, elite and rigorous enough to satiate her ego while still being a haven for demigods, and she’s currently majoring in pre-law with the intent to go to law school and become a lawyer!

PERSONALITY

she’s an acquired taste for sure

someone’s first impression of hande is typically negative 95% of the time, and she’s not even remotely insulted by that. she knows she’s brash, she knows she’s outspoken, she knows she can be mean, and she’s unapologetic about it because why should she have to adapt her personality to be palatable to people who are probably weaker and stupider than her??? (her thoughts not mine)

i really have to stress she’s not a dick just because she likes to be a dick to people... like she’s not gonna go to up to anyone’s muses and start bullying them in person for NO REASON.... she is an ADULT WOMAN.... but you provoke her, and there will be a reason

she’s extremely passionate about causes she believes in and sees her opinions about everything from food to weather to politics as the complete truth, so what she might see as playful banter when someone holds a different opinion actually comes across as extremely rude and bitchy to the person getting brutally attacked by her unwarranted point of view. but when she’s actually trying to argue with you, you’ll know

she’s kind of unique for a daughter of ares in that she really doesn’t engage in much physical violence since she entered college, preferring instead to start what could be considered “warfare” over the internet and academically with similarly high achieving peers. but she DOES know how to fight, she just would rather die than have another child of ares intervention by the demigod authorities ASDKSKDFSDMF

so ambitious and academically competitive. it’ll cause her to have an aneurysm at age 22 at the rate she’s going. you didn’t hear it from me but she isn’t ABOVE sabotage if someone tries stealing her #1 spot... tonya harding anyone?? hande is definitely someone who would sacrifice you to a monster or shove you into the lake if it meant she looked better in the end... so that’s something she probably needs to work on

BUT with all that being said, if you aren’t being beaten down by her insane argumentative skills, and hande actually takes a genuine liking to you, you’ll find that she’s... a pretty normal person for the most part. she’s pretty witty, fiercely loyal to the few friends she does have, super smart, and generally pretty enjoyable company. very generous with her money (loves paying for her friends’ food) and cares deeply about everything she argues so intensely about. a lot of people never give her enough of a chance to get to know her (and understandably so), but if you did you really wouldn’t find the image of a shallow bitch that’s often projected onto her

there’s this facebook meme that goes “Need to find new haters... my old ones starting to like me 😂” and that’s it that’s her entire life

if you want to know more just read her app!!

MISCELLANEOUS

fluent in german, greek, english, and turkish (in order of how often she uses them, though greek is arguably used more than german at this point, she’d just rather die than admit it)

she starts twitter wars and trolls people online in all 4 languages. it’s her primary pastime and she’s been permanently suspended from twitter a whopping 4 times, but every time she just re-spawns and comes back stronger. absolutely notorious for saying out of pocket shit what she thinks about any given european country and the people who live there and getting ganged up on by said people SASDSDASD her favorite people to cyberbully are british people and french people... rip

captain of the debate team, and part of model un and mock trial. her ruthless captaincy of the debate team has caused multiple freshman interested in joining to flee in tears, but eonia routinely kicks ass in debate in tournaments across greece and europe as a whole, so it’s not all bad. she is unbelievably skilled in debate and honestly pretty friendly to the people who actually manage to stick around on the team

kicked out of the feminist club for being overtly confrontational... if your muse is in the feminist alliance, hmu for plots

when she started attending athens’ demigod camp, it got in the way of her going to istanbul with her mother every summer to visit family. she's only started routinely going again since attending university, so most of her time is spent between istanbul and athens and hasn’t been back to germany in a hot second

i just feel like she has the type of energy to own a chihuahua and carry it around in her purse. no allowed pets at eonia but STILL.... that’s the vibe lads

her sexuality is ambiguous and she likes to keep it that way because it’s no one’s business but any and all romantic plots are open to all genders :~)

aside from her odikinesis, she’s able to put minor curses on weapons and will usually do so to make somebody else look like a fool during training

#euintro #waltzing into my own party late... wow #i could definitely add more but. this NEEDS to be posted

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vaguely-concerned · 5 years ago

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Some Alec Ryder Meta

So since I couldn’t find the screenshots of Alec Ryder’s dying ‘thoughts’, I went and got them myself!* And I am uh way closer to crying than I thought I would be, Alec sort of surprised me here. Let’s go!

I was NOT prepared for his literal first thought to be of his children. And notice -- this is not his children being impressive or special or idk ordered/obedient. It’s them being happy and safe and playing and chaotic. I uh did not expect this, frankly.

I’m guessing this is where they used to live when the kids were small! (Would this be before or during their time on the Citadel? The timeline there is so hazy to me haha, I can never quite remember how that works)

Baby Scott on the swing ;______; I wonder if Alec is ‘there’ off screen in this scene, pushing him, since we start off with a shot looking over Scott’s shoulder like that

Can I just say how quietly charmed I am by the fact that in Alec’s memories Ellen isn’t captured when she was ~*young and beautiful*~ or whatever nonsense -- she’s a mature woman, the same age as himself. It feels like there is something sweet and telling in that, like they were partners/equals in his mind. (This also makes me very uncomfortable to think he didn’t ask her/didn’t get her consent at the last moment on her death bed to put her in stasis, after the twins left the room at least; he seems to have respected her so much, if he went against her wishes that’s... such a breach of everything she seems to have meant to him and really should have been addressed more because it would essentially be his big sin as a character. So I choose to believe for now that when the kids left he did one last ‘give it this one last shot and I promise that if I find nothing within a certain time I’ll let you go and grieve like a normal fucking person’ sales pitch, possibly with prepared Science to back him up because they were both kind of weird like that and I think that if anything could have worked that would. ‘But think of the scientific implications tho babe wouldn’t you want to be able to find out how worked?’ ‘...You’ve got me there’)

More confirmation that Ellen had probably come to terms with her death and Alec Really Hadn’t lol. (Ellen might have just been grateful she lost neither of her children to the eezo exposure, actually -- she would have understood intimately how phenomenally lucky they were that both the twins survived and were healthy to boot) If I were to hazard a guess I’d say that Alec probably was in pretty bad need of space therapy even before his wife got ill, she was just his emotional support and he was intelligent and driven enough to hide most of it until that stability came under threat

:( this is upsetting. It doesn’t come across as well without the movement but he’s bowing his head and putting his face in his hands. Either Ellen when she’s really sick or when she uh ‘died’

I’m fairly sure that’s Ellen’s eyes -- and crucially they’re opening again.

Mom and the twins :’) I think it’s pretty clear Alec did that thing some people (especially men) do where they sort of organize all their feelings through their partner -- “Your mother would have been proud of you, of both of you” JESUS CHRIST ALEC JUST TELL YOUR CHILDREN YOU’RE PROUD OF THEM LIKE YOU ACTUALLY MEANT TO SAY, THEY ALREADY KNOW THEIR MOM LOVED THEM FOR GOD’S SAKE YOU ARE THE UNCERTAIN ELEMENT HERE

ETA: actually this might also have something to do with how convinced he seems to be that the kids don’t need him -- that his love and attention and regard doesn’t matter or count, or would even be seen as an imposition (he consistently refers to himself pretty self-deprecatingly in connection to them, their ‘old man’ coming in and messing up their lives, like he considers his absence to probably be the best he can do for them? He certainly devalues his own impact massively, positive or negative). Meanwhile Ellen’s place in all their lives is a clear and uncontested positive so maybe that’s why he goes for her pride and her love like that. Again: who the fuck raised this weird dysfunctional man to be like this and how did he get away with it for so long haha

Alec and adult/at least teenaged twins! a) I suspect going to another galaxy with them to explore might honestly have been his idea of how bonding works, which... well and b) Sara is right behind him, leaning in like she’s listening and interested in what he’s saying and maybe even speaking too, and Scott looks to me like he’s sort of stranded on the side, looking in but not quite able to connect the same way. (This might be coloured by what I know about their respective relationships from the rest of the game, granted)

The same memory as before BUT interestingly --

the camera is turning around, like Alec is trying to get a look at his children’s faces and can’t :) this is fine and not at all illustrative of his entire deal *everything in my heart is on fire*

sOME observations:

- These flashes give you more emotional insight in him than all the unlockable memories put together, and you’ll literally never see most of them unless you’re a freak like me, painstakingly frame by framing your way through it. That... seems like a waste??

- Despite his numerous flaws and shortcomings as a parent and as a person, literally every single thought he has at the end is about his family -- and not only his wife, all of them. There’s no place for his work here at all. That doesn’t absolve him of anything, of course, but it makes me sad that he never found a better way to show it, or to emotionally connect with his children, which he seems to have a real wish to. (”Maybe six hundred years can change a man”) Bioware... Bioware sequel pls don’t leave it like this ;_________;

- He himself does not figure prominently in his memories, and when he does he is faceless and vague -- except for when he is completely alone with his grief and Ellen is gone. I think there is something to be said about the fact that he makes all these huge inspiring speeches about the unknown and exploration... and yet his actual motivation is so firmly rooted in this immense fear of the unknown and of himself, of not knowing who to be without his wife, of not knowing how to go on living, of being alone. I wonder to what degree he knows this himself. (From what I’ve read so far of Mass Effect Initiation he certainly isn’t as idealistic about the whole thing as even the game portrays him, where he’s show to be pretty clear-eyed about the Initiative already -- or maybe he sort of is an idealist, under the fear and the jaded exhaustion. Either he genuinely believes Andromeda will hold answers and that science can achieve the impossible or he’s just too scared to consider any other outcome. Oh Boy tm)

- Ellen’s illness is such a cataclysmic event for him that I really have to assume he was never that stable to begin with. And as we’ve seen: When a Ryder goes off the rails they do so in STYLE and drag thousands of people with them to an uncertain fate haha

- My personal headcanon is that Alec used to be a better dad before Ellen got ill and when the kids were still very young; when all they really needed was to be held and loved and made to feel safe, and then became more and more distant as his work with SAM progressed and the children’s emotional needs grew more complex and demanding. Sara remembers this part of their father better (or clings to it more desperately, depending on your point of view) and is also more like him in general, being driven, competitive and intensely intellectually engaged (no matter how you play her in-game, Sara is always presented as vastly more A Nerd than Scott is -- its own can of worms of course but it’s there in the text). Meanwhile Scott has reached a resigned sort of ‘It’s perfectly plausible my dad would not be able to pick me out from a crowd’ place about it and given up on expecting anything more a long time ago in self defense. I think they’ve both hit on different parts of the truth there lol

(Also Sara and Alec seem to have bonded over making fun of Scott a little bit and considering him the underachiever of the two and like Not Cool guys!!! :( )

- Anyway Alec Ryder is a very interesting and immensely flawed character and killing him off and never meaningfully engaging with him again seems like throwing away a golden opportunity. Sequel where ‘Ghost Riders’ takes on a new meaning when??? I just want the twins to be able to either yell at him or connect to him better, as appropriate to the feelings of the individual player (I totally get why people would want to give their Ryders a chance to straight up hate him)

I think where it really hurts for me is that he clearly has these feelings, the capacity for it. There’s a wealth of affection and... tenderness? reverence, nearly? in these memories. None of his outward hardass needs-everything-to-be-under-control persona. And yet he could find no way to express this or even really meaningfully stay with his own feelings and his children suffered for it. It’s just all so fucking sad

*Courtesy of DanaDuchy’s youtube channel, which is truly one of the marvels of the internet; please check it out if you have any interest at all in Bioware games or indeed RPGs/games in general, there’s SO much content and it’s all neatly organized! If like me you want to listen to all the banter of every game... this channel’s got you covered

#mass effect #mass effect andromeda #meta #alec ryder #is a real SOB but the more I learn about him the more grudging confused affection I have for him lol #this must be what it's like to be the ryder twins #today in the 'I know no one asked for this but my brain won't shut up about it' report lol

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lochtayboatsong · 4 years ago

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Day 270 (10 December 2020)

School is done for the semester, which means I have time to play The Sims 2 again. Nerdery/random idle thoughts incoming:

- I’ve just downloaded Monique’s Hacked Computer. I’m still playing around with the banking capabilities, but I already love it for letting me order clothing and gadgets without having to have my sims travel to community lots.

- I’ve also downloaded a hack which enabled me to alter the lifespans in my game, because I’ve always felt that the “Child” life stage was too short. The way I play, each sim day equals six months, which means that all my kids were aging into teenagers on approximately their 8th or 9th birthday. I’ve tweaked it to make it longer, along with the “Teen” and “Adult” life stages. I’ve been using SimPE to make my Adults stay young for longer (because it’s really hard to manage family planning realistically otherwise), but now it should all be fixed for me!

- On deck to download: A mod to make pregnancy shorter (36 sim hours rather than 75), and possibly a mod to make university semester length shorter as well. Pregnancy lasting 36 hours fits in beautifully with my “1 sim day = six months” rule, but I’m holding off on downloading that one until all my sims who are currently pregnant give birth. I don’t know what the mod does to pregnancies which are already in progress and I don’t want to mess anything up.

- I’ve got some sims progressing through college, whose ultimate fates I have yet to decide. This is a bit of a departure for me, as university is usually where I do my heavy-duty matchmaking and career planning.

- Edward and Shelby are going to be my Golden Political Couple, of course. Edward’s moms are loaded, so I’m going to use the hacked computer to have them gift him some funds for a nice house as a graduation present.

- I’ll move Brooke into an apartment while she gets her fashion design career off the ground and waits for Andrew to graduate. Maybe one of those nice European-style brownstones I recently downloaded.

- Seymore, who I’ve mentioned before (the Weird Kid who is *constantly* getting laid), will probably be content with one of those small houses Downtown. Stephanie is gonna be my new Town Strumpet, but in a more genteel way than previous ones I’ve had. More of a successful career woman who *knows* she’s sexy and sleeps with who she likes when she likes, than a slacker who barely holds down a job to pay the bills in between dates.

- Mayumi is gonna move in with Alexander, and they’ll be my Badass Tech Couple. They’re gonna wait several years to have kids, so they’ll be fine in Alexander’s place for a while.

That covers my current university upperclassmen, but I’m still in a quandary about some of my underclassmen.

- Ella and Dmitri are easy, because they’ve already paired off. I think I’m gonna have Ella be her parents’ legacy child, so she and Dmitri can just move back in with them after graduation.

- Roland is gonna move into his great-grandparents’ old house. I’ve been planning on that for a while. He’s been one of Stephanie’s side-pieces for a bit, but this past semester he started hanging out with a Townie who lives in his dorm, and I think I like the two of them together.

- Now the crux of the matter: I’ve got three single ladies who I really don’t know what to do with: Alenah, Fatima, and Chloe. Alenah is the eldest daughter of a prominent family, and she should be getting ready to make a dynastic marriage after college, but the pickings are slim. She’s too closely related to all the well-bred males her own age, and one of the younger boys who I was considering as an eventual match for her has begun making eyes at one of the Bertino girls. She’ll have to either marry a Townie or leave the dynastic considerations to her younger sister. Meanwhile, Fatima is just too prickly and ill-tempered for me to match with anyone right now. Chloe is a Townie who I decided to move to Uni with the long-term aim of keeping the gene pool diverse, but without any specific romantic matches in mind for her. I’ll see how Victor and Joseph like her when they start college next semester.

Now that I think of it...back in the days of Sims 1, my favorite households to play with were female trios, each working her way up a different career path. Usually some variation on “The Responsible One,” “The Sweet Cinnamon Roll,” and “The Wild Child.” All co-habitating, all kicking ass in their chosen field. So there’s a certain symmetry to revisiting that play style now. I might just have my three single ladies share an apartment after college and see how the story plays out.

#plague anchorite challenge #the sims 2 #ts2

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afterourhearts · 4 years ago

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Eyeliner Tears

Why are Asian eyes so ugly? I thought to myself as I outlined their shape with the blackest liner I could dig out from the free Lancôme makeup samples Mom never used. This was my daily routine since I first discovered the beautiful black pencil when I was 12 alongside lip gloss, mascara, and blush. But eyeliner was my favorite – changing most dramatically what I hated most passionately. • Monolids are ugly because they make eyes look like slits. • Double lids are ‘mutant’ because, as my white medical professor once so aptly described, “Epicanthic folds are a prominent feature of Down Syndrome. If you don’t know what they are, Asians commonly have this feature.” Let’s face it: we can’t win, at least not in the beauty arena. But with my eyeliner adding the illusion of a larger eye, I felt halfway there. Not everyone, however, appreciated my foray into adolescent self-transformation. The Chinese beauty culture operates very differently than American beauty culture: pale skin, small mouths, soft bodies, and youthful innocence are prized over glowing tans, wide smiles, athletic frames, and sultry seductiveness. To achieve the Chinese beauty ideal of youthful innocence, heavy makeup such as eyeliner is unacceptable, and makeup at all is frowned upon for younger girls. Mom called them “raccoon eyes” and told me I looked uglier with it on but I never heeded her advice. She also said respectable girls did not waste their time on vanities like makeup, but rather immersed themselves in their studies. She especially hated when I wore makeup to church, a place where teenage girls are supposed to look extra pure. I rolled my raccoon eyes. One year, I met a new girl at our Chinese Christian Church. She was talkative, witty, similarly loved makeup and rebellion, and we became fast friends. This same year, a new youth pastor arrived at our church. He was funny, fluent, and finally our first youth pastor who wasn’t middle-aged. So how do they tie back to eyeliner? Prior to their arrival, I dreaded attending church, paranoid that the judgmental eyes of multitudes of Chinese parents hated my appearance and shared the Chinese cultural views held by my mother. Was it paranoia, or was I just observant? Adults would enthusiastically praise my younger brother’s handsome features and say nothing about my appearance other than, “She is tall!” Their smiles seemed disingenuous and their attitudes towards me distant. Or maybe I was just overly sensitive. Regardless, much of that paranoia melted away with the arrival of a new friend and youth pastor – two characters who seemed more attuned than the other members to the Asian-American dichotomy that was my life. I began to loosen up at church, smile more, and even happily greet the adults. I felt … safe. Maybe not enthusiastically accepted, but also not frowned upon with disdain. One might wonder why I was so concerned for approval from within my Chinese church. When you live in a country spearheaded by people who don’t view you as truly American, you cling onto the safe spaces that still might take you in and consider you a member. I wasn’t aware of how shaky my walls of comfort had been built, though, until one sentence caused them to tumble back down again. “He said he doesn’t like you because you wear so much eyeliner.” She told me. She being my new best friend and he being the cool and young youth pastor we both adored. “How do you know this?” I asked, disbelief and doubt at each other’s throats in the battleground that was now my mind. “Because he told my mom. And my mom told me that it’s not just him who thinks this way, but a lot of other parents. They tell their kids to stay away from you because you are a bad influence.” Bad influence. Me, the introvert who rarely speaks, a bad influence? I let that sink in. That night, I considered giving up my eyeliner. I thought all my fears about being hated by my friends’ parents were unfounded and paranoid. I thought my youth pastor would especially not judge me by something so exterior – actually, why would he judge me at all? Why would a grown ass man concern himself so heavily with whether a teenage girl wears eyeliner? Anger and sadness bubbled up around me. How did one of my greatest fears, one I thought had been pushed away and laid to rest for good, one which only my new friend knew so intimately, suddenly come to surface all over again? And that’s when it hit me: maybe she lied. The seed of thought that this supposed best friend might not actually like me at all was planted. And over the next few months, it thirstily drank up water and sunlight. I befriended other girls and began to uncover bits and pieces of the horrifying truth: she did hate me, and they had evidence. Screen captures and chat conversations were forwarded to my inbox. Not only did she tell others about how terrible I supposedly was, she also told them I disliked all of them and fabricated statements I had never uttered nor so much as thought. I could not believe it – why did she want to destroy my life and capitalize on my insecurities? What did I ever do but consider her my friend? Sometimes, you never get answers. Not too many months after, she moved again. We stumbled across each other’s Instagram accounts a few years later. She had dyed hair, tattoos, piercings all over, eyeliner wings bolder than I had ever applied, false lashes nearly reaching her thickly painted eyebrows, the same deceptively sweet smile as when we first met, and was surrounded by other Asian girls. I once burned with the anger of her betrayal, but all I could think about now was her new embodiment of the criticisms she claimed were the reasons for my rejection from our community and how ironic our appearances were now – me being the studious medical student who sometimes forgets to wear eyeliner and she being the girl who refuses to be seen in public without it - the pictorial epitome of the bad influence she once used to mark me for social abandonment from our only remaining community. Irony, Karma, or Hypocrisy? Today, I won’t know if sprinkled between her lies were grains of truth, and if her comment about my reputation was one of them. I won’t know if my eventual submission to certain Asian cultural values drew its main roots from my teenage experience of potential two-fold community rejection. I won’t know if she ever realized the extent to which she hurt me or if she continues to hurt in similarly sneaky ways our other Asian sisters struggling to find acceptance and self-love in a land which has subjected them to unwarranted rejection. What I do know is this: We All Cry The Same Eyeliner Tears Yes, we do. They trickle down from our unmistakably Asian eyes, glide along our sunscreen laden faces, and leave smudgy black streaks to remind us of both our perceived physical imperfections as well as our efforts to conceal the ugliness we feel inside.

Feeling ugly is not just some manifestation of low self-esteem as these American schools/media/counselors might tell us in order to erase from our mutual history and from their responsibility the ‘chink’ comments that we heard or the fingers-pulling-eyes-upward-to-mimic-us that we saw.

Our damaged self-esteem is not some personal mental and emotional disorder or a reflection of our weakness but a collective experience caused largely in part by the pervasive belief that some belong here but we don’t and that some are beautiful but we aren’t. Don’t think that just because dating apps are now asserting, “Asian girls are the most desired race!” that the girls who come after us are protected from the less-than we endured. The American dating scene did not just become more “accepting” of us – we changed to look more like them. But underneath the beautifully and extravagantly drawn eyeliner wings, the perfectly filled in eyebrows, the time-consuming application of fake lashes, the hours spent at the gym to avoid ‘Asian flat butt’ stereotypes, and the sharp cut of the surgery knife on our eyelids, we still cannot help but wonder: is this beautiful yet? And when he says, “Yes”, we still worry, was I not beautiful before? Do we really want to be with the ones who only want what is made-to-order, and overlook the ones who saw the original, in all its imperfections, as worth discovering? So while I have every right to be mad at my Asian sister for the hurtful actions she made against me as a result of her wanting to be more accepted by our community than I was, I cannot lose sight of the more formidable barrier to our collective inability to self-love: not the lies she told before, but the lies they still tell today. Why are my Asian eyes so ugly? I used to think to myself constantly. And if you’ve read this until the end, I think you know the answer.

_____________________________________________________________

Comments: Friends who have read this far or read my shared thoughts at all, I know my experiences are not isolated. My past shared posts related to familial pressures and relationships have shown me just how overlapping our experiences can be. The feelings of low self-esteem and self-image at some time or another in your life is probably a universal one. Experiences of betrayal are sadly quite common. Hopefully you enjoyed this short piece - it’s a bit different from the other posts I’ve written (a little more cleaned up and narrative when compared to my usual frenetic ranting) ... anyways, I wanted to share that I’ve been working on putting together some more shorts + poems in my free time (this is how I destress from school haha) and something I hope to achieve through writing with this project (and since day one) is unfiltered and unapologetic storytelling highlighting the Asian voice that is so often completely ignored in discussions of race and discrimination. I’m not saying our experiences are to be equated to the experiences of other minorities because noo, but I am saying we should at least be included in the discussion.

This brings me to my next point: I want to continue to share your stories too. If you have experiences you want to share related in any way to your identity as an Asian-American female, I want to hear them and with your permission, try to make prose or poetry of it. Text me, message me, or call me and let’s get in touch :) Thank you for being a part of this whether as a reader or direct contributor. Let’s shape our collective voice!!!

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wistfulcynic · 5 years ago

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⭐⭐⭐Give me your director's cut on any story you choose, I'd happily read them all!

This leaves a WIDE open field but I’m gonna opt for Another Brick in the Wall, because I think it was the first fic of mine you commented on and also it remains one of my favourites despite some glaring flaws. I just loved writing it so much. It sort of took over my life at the time (about a year ago!) and I couldn’t stop writing it. This is unfortunately what led to some of the things that I wish I could change, what I feel are some rushed scenes and some opportunities for development I didn’t take. Things like the friendship between Ruby and Emma, the relationship between Emma and Neal, and Emma’s character generally as the school’s popular princess that I didn’t really explore because I was so focused on Emma and Killian’s relationship and on Killian himself. If I had it to do over again I would focus on these things, and take things more slowly, and let the plot develop layer by layer instead of the OMG EXPOSITION DUMP that I had a few times due to all the words being in my head and demanding release.

We live and (hopefully) learn.

The whole thing started because I had read a bunch of high school AUs that had Killian either as a super-nerd or a Bad Boy(TM) and it annoyed me so much because I just don’t think he would be either. Mostly because those archetypes are tired and cliched and in reality they don’t actually exist. High school kids are fully rounded and complex people just as adults are, and Killian Jones in particular is a character with so many facets that trying to fit him into such a narrow niche like that is absurd. He would have aspects perhaps of both, being very smart and into reading and genuinely enthusiastic about the things he loves (characteristics of ‘nerds’) but also moody and inclined to brooding with a very low tolerance for other people’s bullshit or for anyone trying to manipulate or control him, and of course with that quick and violent temper that as a teenager he would struggle to control even more than he does as an adult (’bad boy’ traits). Then there’s also the fact that he’s a sensitive person who feels things deeply and who shows every emotion in his eyes and wears his heart on his sleeve. Which, paired with that face, would mean girls would go mad for him, and especially American girls when you factor in the British accent. And that attention is something he would handle smoothly with his natural charm and charisma but also not feel entirely comfortable with as he’s a person who is all-in 100% committed in relationships, and I can’t see him as a serial dater, at least not as a 16-year-old.

So I set out to write him as a complex, layered character who is neither nerd nor rebel but just himself. New kid in school, in a new country, how would he cope with that, and what would he do? At the beginning I had only the vaguest idea of how that would play out and didn’t really work out all the details of his past with Milah until I started to write them (another thing I would do differently if I could go back in time). But that--that relationship--that was the catalyst that really kicked things into gear. Because I thought WHAT IF. What if Killian met Milah ten years earlier in both their timelines? That age difference that you hardly blink at when it’s people in their 20s and 30s takes on a whole new aspect when it’s a teenager with a 20-something. It becomes something potentially abusive, definitely unbalanced in terms of power dynamics, and something that a teenage boy definitely would not have the tools to cope with. And I thought how would that affect him? What would he be going through in his head, with all his emotions heightened by hormones and the sense of obligation he feels towards people he loves, PLUS how hard he tends to be on himself in situations when he believes he’s failed? It’s a LOT and a lot of fascinating things to unpack and explore. And they just ran away with me.

And then there was Emma. Emma (as you know!) can be a tough character to write in some AUs because what the show basically treated as her defining characteristic (WALLS(TM)) would not exist in an Emma raised by loving parents in a small town where everyone knew her and where her family was prominent and respected. But neither would she be the useless airhead that Wish!Emma was shown to be. She would still be smart and brave and deeply caring, and would want to help people. But she could hardly help having a pretty high opinion of herself (not uncommon in beautiful teenage girls) and it’s likely she would also be a bit spoiled. Not to the point of being a mean girl, I don’t think she’s capable of that, but definitely someone who never really had to deal with wanting something she couldn’t have. Kind and loving but also very privileged, and very, very clueless about that privilege. Someone nice to everyone and loved by all, with her pick of the boys in school and completely unprepared for how it feels when she falls in love with the only one who doesn’t bow at her feet. Because Killian wouldn't. He would fall hard and fast (of course!) but he wouldn’t want to be just another worshipper at her altar, and of course he would still be dealing with the fallout from Milah and his perceived failure to save her, and would naturally think he wasn’t worthy of someone like Emma. Which would make him surly and defensive, which would make her even more intrigued and determined to get him to let her in.

I also think that Emma with this upbringing would not be particularly introspective. She would pretty much go along with what was expected of her, from her parents and her classmates and the town. Until she was given a reason to take a hard look at herself, another perspective that challenged her. And in this teenaged Killian and teenaged Emma would balance each other in that way that I believe is absolutely essential for this relationship (for all relationships really). She helps him heal and to forgive himself, he helps her find her real self and her path and to take charge of her life and her future.

And this is why I loved writing this fic so much and why it still counts among my favourites. It was so fascinating and such a challenge to dig into these characters and imagine them as teenagers in this verse and to make them believable both as real adolescent people and also as Emma Swan and Killian Jones. And I was tickled to death when someone commented on AO3 that ABITW Emma was exactly how they imagined Emma would be if raised by her parents.

So this has turned into quite the Wall Of Text, but I hope you enjoy it my dear and thank you so much for the ask! I really enjoyed answering it!

SEND ME A DIRECTOR’S CUT ASK

#asked #asked and answered #director's cut ask #katie-dub #lovely shipmates

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hanksthompson · 5 years ago

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Literally no one has to read this, it’s just an Eddie freeform so I could get a handle of his thought process, while also being a tl;dr of his events in the second movie;;;;;

It’s like....over 1,000 words, don’t @ me

You aren’t sure how long you had the label. A loser. You suspect it happened back when your dad passed away, around the same time your mom had grown more protective. You think it was around that time that kids started treating you differently, solely because you had grown different as a result of her behavior. Not that you recognized that detail for what it was at the time. You were maybe 5 when it happened? What kid would recognize their own parents' abusive tendencies at an age like that…

Or maybe you’re wrong on that front. Maybe you adopted the title the minute you became friends with Bill Denbrough. And, as a later result, Richie Tozier and Stan Uris. It was only the four of you, a small group of “losers”, but...you’d be wrong if you thought it didn’t give you some level of comfort. After all, they were the first people after your dad to treat you as normal as kids your age could. A group that let you be a kid, and run as much as you always wanted to, but never could because of the persistent fear of something fatal happening to you. Because of the ever-present, nagging voice of your mom that never seemed to leave your conscience. Every little thing you wanted to do would result in being internally scolded by her, it’s easier to just listen and follow her rules.

ℛ+ℰ

Summer of 1989 was...a long one, you remember that. A long, complicated time. One that completely defied your expectations. But then again, what were you supposed to expect? Just the same as every summer, maybe. Though it’d be stupid to expect that, as well. That year was, ultimately, different from any others, ever since the beginning. Really ever since Georgie went missing died. You remember that revelation pretty clearly, unfortunately…

Trying to find Bill’s brother should’ve been obvious from the get-go, but even knowing that, you wouldn’t have expected getting wrapped up in IT’s business. That you happened to occupy one of the years that It awoke. Every 27 years, supposedly, and you happened to get caught up in it. How bullshit is that? But if it weren’t for those events...you aren’t sure how likely it would’ve been that you met the rest of your friends. Ben, Beverly, and Mike. It always felt like there was an outside force to the group getting drawn together, but that was easy to dismiss as a teenager. You just know that, outside of the shitty adults, Bowers and his gang, and the journey you went on for Bill’s sake, you had fun with those 6. You always had fun with Richie them.

It’s hard to explain why everything started to blur together when that year started coming to a close. When it got closer to your own birthday. Do you even remember how that went? Who forgets their own birthday...

ℛ+ℰ

Myra Kaspbrak...the name is one that you’re all too familiar with, but one that you aren’t sure if you’re comforted by or not. You recognize the fact you should be, granted it was your decision to marry her in the first place. Though you’re left wondering if those particular events in your life would’ve played out the same way if, for example, you had any other type of job. You were only familiar with her because she was a co-worker, after all.

Outside of that, however, sometimes you question the basis of that relationship. She was some sense of familiarity to you, of course, you knew that well enough. But it felt like that was the only thing for you to go off of in the marriage. More often than not, she felt like a source of stress to you. But you’re certain that you love her. You always felt more certain of that whenever you had to leave her. Especially when it was time to leave for Derry.

You wonder if you should feel guilty. For only thinking about her when the topic of marriage came up during the reunion. When in the company of old friends-- friends you had forgotten about, for crying out loud --after 27 years without being around them. It seems natural, right? It’s natural to focus on them. It’s natural to focus on Richie catch up with them, first and foremost. That’s just how you were. You would put the spotlight on them before yourself unless pushed to do otherwise. That was never a fact you questioned, but just accepted for what it was.

Being with them felt...right, in a way. Like this was how it was supposed to be. Always. Even if the memories of your childhood are slowly coming back, you can’t help but wonder why everyone started to drift apart. You vaguely remember someone moving? You aren’t too sure about that. Someone that was important, but one you ultimately didn’t talk with as much as you should’ve as kids. You remember a faint smell of smoke too. Maybe that was just the restaurant, though.

ℛ+ℰ

The realization that you were lied to, maybe even tricked, just to return to Derry hit hard. But not because you didn’t want to be here, of course. This place was, oddly enough, still home to you. And you loved your friends. You were acutely aware of that. The root of your anxiety was backed up by Mike’s reasoning for wanting everyone back in Derry. You didn’t have time to prepare, now knowing that 27 years passed, because you forgot. You forgot damn near everything about that summer, especially everything revolving around IT. You didn’t have time to even brace yourself, let alone feel ready to tackle something like this again. It made you feel sick. A deep feeling you’ve almost forgotten about.

And ultimately, not one you’re ready to fully face again when you’re instructed to split up. To explore your old home by yourself. The mere suggestion of it honestly sounded like the most ridiculous thing to you. And yet...you and the others followed through. And you let your feet carry you to one of the places you were most familiar with, growing up: the Pharmacy. It was honestly a bit surprising to see that not much had changed. Not just in terms of the layout, but that Mr. Keene and Greta had still been working there. They still looked the same, uncomfortably so.

And, on another uncomfortable note, the basement still looked the same as well. Every detail, right down to the damn curtain hung up. You never understood that, even as a teenager. What you didn’t expect was to have a similar experience down here, to the one you had when you were younger. When you couldn’t save your mom saw It again. You remember that encounter. You remember all of those encounters, and how sick you felt after. You always dismissed it as just being grossed out from the leper, but a part of you knew there was more to it than that.

Sure, the sight of a disease-infested man was enough to make your skin crawl at the time, but it was nothing compared to the own rotting you felt inside of you. A feeling that was not only prominent whenever you saw the leper, but even more so when you passed by the town’s church. A sense of sickness, rotting, and shame. You always felt dirty. A part of you knew why, while the other part was in denial.

In denial that it happened especially around Richie. That some part of you was doing something wrong whenever you would enjoy his company, despite your own protests. A part of you knew you wouldn’t be clean until you stopped wanting him could put all these thoughts behind. You’ll just bottle it up, just like you always do.

ℛ+ℰ

You aren’t sure, at what point in your life, you became this much of a coward. With what you remember of your childhood, you weren’t always that way, at least you’re certain of that much. You remember being able to fight back for yourself, and you remember getting irrationally angry when Richie got hit first in the rock war something happened to any of your friends. You recognize the fact that you’ve always been the youngest, and yet, that never stopped you from trying to protect them to the best of your ability. You vaguely remember the idea that you’d be ready to die for any of them, the minute they asked it from you.

So what happened now? It couldn’t be old age. You could still handle yourself when Bowers had paid an unexpected visit and stabbed you in the face. You were able to handle that much. You managed to at least stab him back, at the very least. You could still defend yourself without much hesitation. So why was it different in Neibolt…

You were scared, you knew that much, but...you’ve always been good at helping your friends when they needed it. Maybe it was the shock from seeing Stan’s head attacking the group. It was obvious this was done by It, of course, but it wasn’t any less jarring to see your old friend’s head roll out from the fridge. ...But was that an excuse? You froze up. You couldn’t do something, anything, when someone you love care about was getting attacked. You didn’t want the others to be mad, but...you understood why they would be. You knew you were useless in that situation.

ℛ+ℰ

The thought you had as a kid, about being willing to die for your friends, was maybe a dumb thought for you at the time. You were only 13, the idea of what that entailed was almost completely lost to you at the time. But it’s that same thought that seems especially prominent in your second fight with It. More so when Richie is caught in the deadlights. It’s one of the few things you focus on at that moment, the other being that you wanted Richie to be safe, first and foremost.

That’s what mattered at that moment.

And you remember feeling a sense of pride in yourself, thinking that you actually did kill It. That this time, you actually saved Richie. Enough pride to distract you from what was happening behind you. But you were oblivious to that, weren’t you? Your own pride blinded you when it was important.

#it chapter 2 #eddie kaspbrak #reddie #because it's gay as shit tbh #don't read too much into this it's just a freeform i wrote for him for rp purposes #don't @ me for my take i'll either get incredibly salty or incredibly sad

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britishassistant · 5 years ago

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Mr. Hale’s Art 301

August— Before Class

7 Months Earlier

Peter needed to remind himself more often that, high schooler or not, Lydia Martin was a force to be reckoned with.

She and the rest of the original Hale-now-McCall pack vowed revenge on him not long after he revived, but all went about it in different ways.

Scott McCall simply punched him in the face and left it at that.

Stiles Stilinski somehow managed to find and break into his apartment and sprinkle crushed wolfsbane into enough garments and towels that Peter was still wary when he was getting ready for the day.

When Allison Argent was alive, she repeatedly left arrows bearing her family sigil in both his home and places he frequented— presumably, like Stiles, to violate his sense of territory and just to show that she could.

Derek just brooded and looked by turns murderous and guilty whenever his uncle was in the room before he left town, though his stint as Alpha could be called punishment enough.

Lydia Martin, however, played the long game.

He still wasn’t quite sure how she’d managed it.

Somehow, despite Peter never sending in his resume or going for an official interview, Lydia Martin had arranged for him to become Beacon Hills Middle School’s new art teacher.

She’d even managed to have a touching, heartfelt story printed on the front page of the Beacon Hills Daily about the miraculously recovered coma patient attempting to give back to the community via imparting his gift to impressionable young minds.

How she’d found out he was capable of art despite all of his portfolios and most of his dissertation research burning in the fire was also a little beyond him, but he digressed.

Scott appeared so moved by the article that any attempts to suggest that Peter wasn’t actually going to take the job resulted in the alpha’s claws and fangs coming out in a way that promised either a maiming or expulsion from the McCall pack entirely.

And Peter had too many irons in too many fires to allow that to happen.

So he’s standing in the front office of Beacon Hills Middle School, contemplating the rictus of existential pain on the face of something he thinks is meant to be a beaver.

It’s one of the better methods that he’s devised so far of blocking out the scent of emerging hormones, social anxiety and too strong body spray belonging to over 300 adolescents that are sleepily beginning to shuffle into the halls of the building.

While waiting to meet the Principal and Assistant Principal of this farce of an educational facility at 6:30 in the fucking morning.

So yes, Lydia Martin needs to have a closer eye kept on her in future.

For the good of man- and werewolf-kind really.

Finally, finally, he’s able to hear a man’s footsteps walking towards where he’s been waiting and politely avoiding the leering gaze of the elderly secretary. For some reason the man’s heartbeat, as choked by cholesterol as it is, sounds vaguely familiar.

“Well, well, well. Long time, no see, Hale.”

A portly man with a large bald spot has swung open the door and stands there with his hands on his hips as though he’s in some kind of soap opera. He has the beginnings of jowls and a shiny badge with the words ‘Assistant Principal’ on it that smells like it’s recently been polished. He’s also got a look of cocksure smugness on his face that seems out of place for some reason—

Peter’s mind supplies an image of a gangly teenager with overlarge glasses, a perpetually resentful expression, one ill-fated month with a fedora, and several pathetic attempts at a beard.

“Tommy!” Peter exclaims, smothering as much delight into his tone as he possibly can. It’s galling that he has to work for this sniveling toad, but he’ll be dammed if he lets the scum of his high school know it. “It’s been ages since we graduated, how have you been? You seem to have done well for yourself.”

Tommy’s face drops into the nostalgic expression of sour resentment that Peter so fondly remembers. “It’s Assistant Principal Thorne to you, Hale.”

He turns sharply on his heel. “You’re late— not a promising start. Follow me.”

‘Because you kept me standing out here for 30 minutes while you primped for your grand entrance, you miserable tapeworm.’ Peter thinks, but does not say, plastering on his widest devil-may-care smile on his face instead.

Memory serves him well despite his brief sojourn into the great beyond, because Thorne’s face twists further in response before he feebly tries to not look like he loathes Peter’s guts.

He is lead into a warren of corridors that end in a door that is marginally nicer than the others, with the plaque ‘Principal Melinda Johnson’ on it.

Thorne knocks on it, and opens it when a pleasant female voice bids they enter.

The Principal is a professional, pleasant woman with cropped hair and prominently displayed family and wedding photos on her desk. She looks him in the eye when shaking his hand and tells him honestly that she is honored to have him on board her staff, without a whiff of arousal to be found in her scent to Peter’s subtle relief.

She is clearly more used to dealing with the administrative affairs of the school as her speech about her school and students makes it evident that she is laboring under the slightly misguided assumption that her successes as a parent have translated to successes as an educator.

Thorne continually shoots his boss dark glances that were overlaid with the warring stink of contempt and arousal.

Peter kept a disgusted snort to himself. The toad really hadn’t changed since high school. He’d been like that around Talia, loathing her for her position as Student Body President and objectifying her in the same breath.

It was one of Peter’s most cherished memories, watching his sister casually verbally tear the covetous little bastard a new one when he tried to suggest that she was somehow unsuitable for her position due to her “womanly concerns”.

It was just a shame she’d shot down his suggestions to tear Thorne’s gaseous black sedan a new one as well.

“And once again, Mr. Hale, may-I-say that your decision to come in so early for your new position shows remarkable promise for your future teaching career.” Principal Johnson enthuses, oblivious to the mutinous glares of her subordinate.

“Early, ma’am?” Peter inquires pleasantly, feeling the prickles of both righteous outrage and not-quite-so righteous homicidal urges at the sight of Thorne’s now sickly grinning face.

“Oh? Well, I thought Mr. Thorne had sent you the package that outlined the time slot for your class this year–1:30, wasn’t it Mr. Thorne?”

“12:30, Principal Johnson, just before A-lunch.” Thorne replies in a tone that does very little to disguise how smug he sounds.

Peter needs to clench his hands slightly to force his claws back in.

Don’t rip his throat out now. It’s too quick. Too painless. Wait until McCall’s pack is suitably weakened, then tear apart this farce of an educational facility while the toad whimpers, and string his guts from the rubble.

Maybe total his car beforehand just to rub salt in the wound.

Peter smiles sheepishly, making sure none of his intentions for the school or certain members of its incompetent staff are visible. “Unfortunately, my apartment’s mail system is a bit byzantine; it wouldn’t surprise me if one of my neighbors ended up with my packet and forgot to return it to me.”

“Oh dear! Well, I’m sure Mr. Thorne can easily print you off another copy, can’t you, Mr. Thorne?”

“Mr. Thorne” curls his lip and then attempts to straighten his expression into a genial smile at the small frown that flits across Principal Johnson’s face.

Peter keeps his look of boyish, charming innocence, and begins to plot exactly how he can have the assistant principal removed from office, and maybe even from the great state of California.

He’s got to amuse himself somehow during this torment, after all.

Peter wishes he’d been able to go home and at least nap for one of the six hours between his meeting with the principal and when he was due to start his class.

But no. Assistant Principal Thorne decided it was imperative for him to meet every member of the faculty that the school building had to offer.

After the third lunch lady and the fourth janitor, the adults began to blur together into an amorphous mass of names, ink and stress-soaked scents, and awful, awful fashion sense.

Really, Peter should be commended on his self-control for not ripping out Thorne’s throat in the boys’ locker rooms then dragging the body outside to claim that it was a random vicious mountain lion attack.

But he digresses.

A couple do stand out.

The gym teacher—Brody or something— who starts out acting like he belongs on McCall’s high school lacrosse team, before breaking down in hysterics over his ex-wife and children. The long-suffering faces of his students suggest that this isn’t an uncommon occurrence.

The mathematics teacher— a Ms. McGrath—who reeks unpleasantly of resentment and poorly concealed fear. She is in the Derek Hale School of trying to control people via shouting and threats, though hers are more geared towards grades than bodily harm.

The english teacher— Mr. Joshua Nord— is a name Peter takes the trouble to remember simply because he appears to be the least afraid of his own students. He could be tolerable company or the one most likely to stand up to Peter if he gets bored and decides to make his own fun.

By the time 12:00 rolls around, Peter already feels exhausted. He hasn’t even had to deal with any of the actual children yet.

He was suddenly very glad for Principal Johnson’s insistence that he only hold one small class this year, as though exposure to too many middle schoolers at once would send him back into a coma.

Still, at least the scents of paints, inks and clay was familiar enough that it loosens something in Peter’s chest a little.

Funny, the things you don’t realize you miss until they’re suddenly returned to you.

He decides to peruse the back rooms, see exactly what he’ll be working with and how much he’ll need to compensate for budget limitations.

It’s mostly cheap paints, crayola color pencils, crayons, markers, a few sharpies, and some watered-down india ink, but at least there’s a decent set of lino blocks, some traditionally “craft” materials, and several air-sealed bags of clay that make him grin in anticipation.

A pair of small footsteps approach his classroom, and the door creaks open.

Peter contemplates emerging, but none of his students should be here yet. The footsteps that creep into the room are cautious, hesitant, ready to turn and run at any moment.

There’s a couple of high-pitched whispers of “It’ll be on the desk!” and “Quickly, quickly!” and Peter shifts so that he’ll be able to spy on the intruders into his territory through the glass window in the back room door.

The brown hair that rests on the child’s shoulders reminds Peter of a beagle’s floppy ears. The bags under her eyes (it’s usually a her with that sort of hairstyle) only furthers the similarities as she looks around wide-eyed on her twitchy, overly-cautious journey to his desk, clutching a brightly colored piece of plastic.

There’s a scent of heavily applied makeup emanating from near the door, combined with high-pitched snickering, suggests that her lookout is most likely a girl as well.

The child finally gets to his desk, and Peter rolls his eyes at the sound of rustling papers.

Really, how does this child ever sneak anything past her parents or older relatives? It’s almost cartoonish how obvious she is— she makes Stilinski at his most discombobulated seem subtle and discrete.

There’s a soft scratching sound, and the scent of graphite. So a basic graffiti prank then. He hopes she at least does something more creative than a simple penis. Though it could make for a good first critique project...

The acrid burst of Sharpie ink gives him pause. Well, either she’s going above and beyond in the call of duty or, as the repetitive sound of the mark making suggests, she’s looking more to conceal something than to add.

Peter’s lips curl into a slow smirk.

The pencil scratches a few more times against the paper before the girl loses her nerve and barrels back towards the door of the classroom, bumping into her lookout, and the two sets of footsteps pound off down the hall, nervous giggles floating in their wake.

Peter lets himself out of the back room, and rearranges the freshly photocopied syllabi and scattered codes of conduct. He pauses to take in the results of the intruder’s meddling.

The smirk widens.

This promises to be interesting.

#my writing #art 301 #art teacher Peter Hale #teen wolf #peter hale #art class #middle school #lydia martin #scott mccall #stiles stilinski #talia hale #teen wolf oc #chase brody #ocs #nanbaka oc #wkm oc #AP Thorne #Principal Johnson

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charminglatina · 6 years ago

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Riverdale Couples & Ships as Romantic Tropes (Part I) ❤️

In this list, I’ll be listing the Riverdale ships and couples (both teen and adult) with the romantic tropes that best represent their relationship on the show. In case you’re wondering where I got the tropes from, I got them from TVTropes.org. This list of couples and their romantic tropes is not a rankings list like my previous other lists which were rankings based on percentages. Because there are so many couples, I have decided to split the lists in two parts. Have fun reading!

#25. Archundy (Archie Andrews & Geraldine Grundy; ROMANTIC TROPE: TEACHER/STUDENT ROMANCE)

Teacher/Student Romance

"I've got it bad, got it bad, got it bad, I'm Hot For Teacher."—Van Halen

It is a pretty good bet that just about any show that features adults and teens interacting in an academic environment will eventually explore a romantic relationship between a teacher and a student. The basis for this type of relationship — if it's actually a romance and not just a Sextra Credit arrangement — can either be the adoration and respect toward the teacher and mentor figure or the teacher's protective and caring instincts, or both. The illicit, forbidden, and most often scandalous nature of these relationships can be mined for angst, and generally doesn't cause real life issues because the actors themselves are generally all above the age of consent thanks to Dawson Casting. But even if the student is eighteen or in college, this sort of extracurricular activity would still be a massive breach of professional ethics in most of the world and in some jurisdictions is considered illegal, regardless of age, in some circumstances (some teachers have been charged for relationships with high school students, even if the relationship didn't begin until after the student turned 18 and the teacher her/himself was only a few years older). Even if it was not illegal, the scandal that would erupt from this socially unacceptable affair would be so devastating it would basically cost a teacher or professor his or her job forever. There are usually different levels of moral endorsement of the relationship, depending on the genders of the participants. Relationships between male teachers and male students are condemned the most harshly. When a male teacher and a female student are together it results in the teacher being viewed as a pervert and sometimes the student being slut shamed. When it's the other way around, a female teacher with a male or even a female student is taken far less seriously. An even more outrageous double standard is that emphasis is often placed on how attractive said female teacher is — the more attractive said teacher, the more acceptable the relationship is. That said, the trope in fiction probably will involve a Hot Teacher, if only for fanservice purposes. An author might attempt to make this relationship less squicky by having the student fulfill the Wise Beyond Their Years trope, by keeping things to Courtly Love only, or by making both participants older — a graduate or doctoral student falling in love with their professor is less likely to cause moral outrage than a high school student doing the same thing due to both participants being adults, though the professional ethics of the situation remain pretty much the same. The relationship may be initiated by a Fille Fatale. A subtrope of Unequal Pairing. Compare Mrs. Robinson. See Likes Older Men, Likes Older Women, and Stacy's Mom for young people lusting after older people in general, Precocious Crush for a more innocent variant, Age-Gap Romance for when there's a significant age difference between them, and Mentor Ship. There's a version specific to magic users called Merlin and Nimue, which takes its cue from the Arthurian Mythos where Merlin formed such a pair with several women. Teacher/Parent Romance occurs when a teacher falls for their student's parent. This group of tropes is among The Oldest Ones in the Book. Although generally frowned upon in Real Life today, it's had varying levels of acceptance throughout history. It was most famously acceptable in Ancient Greece, where it took the form of Lover and Beloved.

#24. Jasolly (Jason Blossom & Polly Cooper; ROMANTIC TROPE: KISSING COUSINS)

Kissing Cousins

"If you're tired of beating around the bush, why not shake the family tree? A hot cousin might fall out."—Stephen Colbert

Romantic/sexual relationships between cousins (meaning, generally, first cousins) are a phenomenon that has been more accepted in some cultures and eras than others. A great many cultures today accept it, including a majority of the industrialized world. Marrying one's extended relatives (which is technically known as clan endogamy) seems to have been common in human evolutionary history, since hominids usually lived in small nomadic bands with few available sexual partners. At the other end of the spectrum, much of the modern U.S.A. considers cousin marriage completely taboo, so Hilarity Ensues at the very mention of it. People from backwoods areas (especially the Appalachian Mountains) are often the preferred butt of many bad jokes as well as occasional bits of Self-Deprecation for the alleged prevalence of Kissing Cousins in their culture. Despite the taboo, cousin marriages are legal in about half the states in the U.S.A., though not as much in the backwoods areas and more in the modern industrialized states, the opposite of what one might expect from hearing all those jokes. Legal or not, these marriages are still not very common due to the lingering cultural taboo. All states permit marriages between second and third cousins, but even these are looked at funny. In the UK, first cousin marriage is unusual and would be regarded as rather odd, but not with the same severity as the US. Second cousin marriages and beyond would be seen as unremarkable. Expect some strong Values Dissonance between the media from the US and other countries, and between certain modern works and works from the nineteenth century and earlier, when the taboo was sometimes non-existent or even inverted. Full scholarly debate on why some cultures would forbid cousins, or even specific types of cousins, to marry, while others ignore or even encourage it, rages on, and lies beyond the scope of this wiki. According to both Oxford's and Merriam-Webster's Dictionaries, the original definition of kissing cousins was simply a relative known well enough to be given a kiss in greeting, although this meaning has long since fallen by the wayside. Check out Incest Is Relative for more closely related tropes. NOTE: This trope is for cases of actual relationships between cousins. Cousincestuous subtext goes in Incest Subtext.

#23. Joaqevin (Joaquin DeSantos & Kevin Keller; ROMANTIC TROPE: BURY YOUR GAYS)

Bury Your Gays

"[Television] has yet to recover from the [2015/16 and 16/17] seasons, which included the deaths of an overwhelming number of lesbian and bisexual women characters. These deaths were often in service of another straight, cisgender character's plotline, and sent a toxic message to audiences. This decades-long trend — referred to in popular culture as "Bury Your Gays" — has made countless headlines in the past year, educating both viewers and creators alike on just how ubiquitous this trope has been."— Opening statement to the 2017/18 GLAAD (Where We Are on TV Report)

The Bury Your Gays trope in media, including all its variants, is a homophobic cliché. It is the presentation of deaths of LGBT characters where these characters are nominally able to be viewed as more expendable than their heteronormative counterparts. In this way, the death is treated as exceptional in its circumstances. Thus, it can be fairly said that, in aggregate, queer characters are more likely to die than straight characters. Indeed, it may be because they seem to have less purpose compared to straight characters, or that the supposed natural conclusion of their story is an early death. Also known as Dead Lesbian Syndrome, though that name has largely fallen out of use post-2015 and the media riots about overuse of the trope. And, as this public outcry restated, the problem isn't merely that gay characters are killed off: the problem is the tendency that gay characters are killed off in a story full of mostly straight characters, or when the characters are killed off because they are gay. However, sometimes gay characters die in fiction because, well, sometimes people die. There are many Anyone Can Die stories: barring explicit differences in the treatments of the gay and straight deaths in these, it's not odd that the gay characters are dying. The occasional death of one in a Cast Full of Gay is unlikely to be notable, either. Can be seen as Truth in Television in some cases, as gay and lesbian people are at a substantially higher risk for suicide and assault — see the tropes Gayngst-Induced Suicide and Homophobic Hate Crime. The fact that AIDS hit the gay male community most prominently provided potent fresh fuel for this long running trope (which, like many things about the eighties, still has an effect on more recent works). There may also be a higher prevalence of this trope in Period Fiction because of its supposed realism since historically there was lots of homophobic persecution — though undoubtedly plenty of acceptance, too. The exact opposite is found in Preserve Your Gays, often a reaction to this.

#22. Kevoose (Moose Mason & Kevin Keller; ROMANTIC TROPE: GAY GUY SEEKS POPULAR JOCK)

Gay Guy Seeks Popular Jock

LGBT media and LGBT characters featured in media have grown in prominence the past few decades. As the visibility grew, a common romance trope was employed over and over again enough that it became cliché: A gay teenager (who is the Audience Surrogate) ranging from Camp Gay to Adorkable to Shrinking Violet falls in love with/actively pursues/crushes on/is paired up with a popular, muscular and (usually) closeted jock. So many gay stories use this trope for several reasons, best written by Brent Hartinger, author of Geography Club.

The Star-Crossed Lovers trope is Older Than Dirt and used for so many love stories already, so it stands that it can be used for a same-sex tale of romance and woe.

Rule of Drama: The geeky gay and jock not only come from different "classes" (so to speak) but also face different hurdles in a Coming-Out Story: The geeky gay always is less conventionally masculine, so he doesn't have much to lose by being honest and open. The jock character, by contrast is a Straight Gay, and by coming out may lose a lot more, especially dropping down the social ladder which can lead to tons of conflict and obstacles for the pair getting together.

Most of these writers are gay and this trope could be construed as a form of Wish Fulfillment: The shy, awkward boy landing a popular handsome athlete is a pretty common fantasy amongst gay men, so it stands that this convention would be pretty prominent.

While a common fantasy, this trope is also Truth in Television as this kind of pairing does indeed happen in Real Life. See also Sensitive Guy and Manly Man, Masculine–Feminine Gay Couple, and Star-Crossed Lovers. Frequently employs Gayngst and the Armored Closet Gay trope. See also Single Girl Seeks Most Popular Guy and All Guys Want Cheerleaders for the heterosexual versions of this trope.

#21. McKeller (Tom Keller & Sierra McCoy; ROMANTIC TROPE: MALIGNED MIXED MARRIAGE)

Maligned Mixed Marriage

"Who can feel sympathy for Desdemona? A woman who, born and educated to a splendid and lofty station in the community, betrays her race, her sex, her duty and her country, and makes a runaway match with a blackamoor."—John Quincy Adams

A common source of conflict for a set of married protagonists (or a couple of Star-Crossed Lovers) is for the couple to be of different races among very unaccepting folks. They will be pressured to break up/divorce by family and friends and community, ostracized, exiled or forced to flee, maimed, or murdered, etc. Their children will be likewise persecuted, perhaps more so than the parents, for complicating racial relations and being inherently 'untrustworthy' due to not being fully one race or the other. Even if the adults are fine, other Kids Are Cruel after all. Expect the child to eventually pop the question about whether there's something inherently and incurably wrong with them because of their genetic heritage. And of course, sometimes it's a mixed species marriage, or one between a muggle and a mage, complete with attendant prejudice. On the plus side the scifi/fantasy elements mean the kid is likely to be The Chosen One, a Half-Human Hybrid, a Dhampyr, or perhaps even a Hybrid Monster with really cool powers. That makes up for it, right? Some examples of interracial marriages that earn disapproval can be found in Mighty Whitey and Mellow Yellow, Black Gal on White Guy Drama, and Where Da White Women At?. For mixed species marriages, see also Vampire-Werewolf Love Triangle. In Real Life, mixed-race marriages can be everything from completely accepted to something you only do if you've got a death wish. Thankfully, in many places it's skewed towards the "completely accepted" end of the spectrum, and a great way for someone to reveal themselves as a severe jackass is to show bigotry towards mixed couples. Mixed-race marriages seem to be one of the last bastions of racism. Many opponents of interracial marriage claim to oppose all other forms of racism including genocide, different legal rights, and the physical segregation of races to prevent cultural contamination (and some claim to have friends of other races). However, they generally argue that that it's cruel to have mixed-race kids because they see race as the sole/most important element of collective identity. This makes the existence of people who blur the boundaries between races distressing for people of those races, who will see their identity as being under threat and in their illogical rage target the unfortunate mixed-race children in their midst. Of course, race is just one element of collective identity and while it can be very important to some people this is by no means a given. In general, mixed-race children tend to have about the same level of trouble that their parents have — less if they look like one race or the other instead of an obvious mixture, or live in a society that doesn't care about race. In stories that take place in communities where "race" isn't a defining factor in classifying humanity (like ''some'' of the 19th century USA, East Asia, or Russia), a "mixed marriage" could mean many other different things: mixed ethnicity ("ethnicity" here being vaguely synonymous with "nationality"), mixed religion, or mixed class. Due to Values Dissonance, many of these other "mixed" marriages tend to be Dead Horse Tropes in fiction (at least in the Anglosphere), though they do surface occasionally: consider My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which mines humor from the "scandal" of a ('white') Greek-American woman choosing a ('white') Anglo-American man as her husband... a thing no longer scandalous in the late 20th century, but most certainly was just a few decades previously. Truth in Television, of course, as there are still people who feel this way. Although anti-miscegenation attitudes are not only found in the classic cases of dominant, traditional, "purity"-seeking communities. Notably, some minorities also vocalize disdain for "disloyalty", stemming from the considerable culture-driven asymmetry in cross-race relationships — a subtle but persistent visual reminder of imposed inferiority — and frustrations in changing the narrative over discomforting perceptions of hyper-attractiveness or lack thereof. Then there are some who are simply pricks. But any of these justifications can end up invoking the trope. To be clear, this trope can cover any romantic relationship, not only matrimony. We just like alliteration here.

#20. Fredary (Fred Andrews & Mary Andrews; ROMANTIC TROPE: AMICABLE EXES)

Amicable Exes

"It's things like using force together, Shouting till you're hoarse together, Getting a divorce together, That make perfect relationships."—Company ( "The Little Things You Do Together")

So, people who break up must indefinitely hate each other, right? Wrong. Increasingly common in media are situations where a divorced couple still get along for the most part, and in many cases still care about each other even though they're no longer together. In many cases the divorce happened because of distance, circumstance or the simple fact that people change rather than infidelity, betrayal or other serious problems, and the fact that they got divorced is treated as a fact of life rather than due to a flaw in the people. Both parties also generally agree that it was for the best for both of them. It's also pretty common for couples who broke up because of Incompatible Orientation or who were each other's Last Het Romance to end up this way. If there are children from the marriage they are shared without much complaint, and the amicability of the parents can often be interpreted as being partly for their sake. As such, this tends to show up in children's cartoons, perhaps as an attempt to counter the stereotype of the children of divorced parents being largely unhappy. May involve a Visit by Divorced Dad that will usually go well, and for the most part any Divorce Assets Conflicts are avoided or settled reasonably. The increase in this trope can be attributed in the dramatic shift in divorce rates and public perception of those who have gone through with divorces in the last 50 years (i.e. between the 1950s and the start of the 21st century). While divorce used to be scandalous, it's now a fairly common occurrence, and this trope reflects the view that it's just a fact of life that doesn't have to permanently poison a relationship. Sometimes it even results in Divorce Is Temporary, though this is less common in more realistic works and those aimed at children due to being a Family-Unfriendly Aesop ("wish hard enough and your parents will get back together!"). Can apply to non divorced former couples as well, thus the name. If someone's current and former squeeze get along well with each other, it's The Missus and the Ex. Compare Working with the Ex and Sex with the Ex. No, this is not about friendly .exe files.

#19. Clinelope (Clifford Blossom & Penelope Blossom; ROMANTIC TROPE: ARRANGED MARRIAGE)

Arranged Marriage

"We who are of noble blood may not follow the wishes of our hearts."—Jane Olsen (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari)

An Arranged Marriage is, quite simply, the idea that someone is going to choose your spouse for you. The way an Arranged Marriage is treated by the plot will be dependent on place and time. For most of human history, arranged marriages were the norm because "marriage" was less about the union of two souls and more about the union of two families. The rise of the "Marry for Love" ideal didn't really start in Western culture until the 16th century, and there are places on Earth where it still hasn't. Additionally, the "Marriage Before Romance" trope often went hand-in-hand with arranged marriages. While the priority is, again, the union of two families, that union is dependent on the stability and comfort of the two people getting married, so the two families would try their best to come up with a Perfectly Arranged Marriage. The couple's happiness just wasn't the main goal the way it is in Western marriages today. However, the one thing that is almost always present in an arranged marriage is tension. Most people don't really want to marry a total stranger (much less have sex with them), and if that total stranger turns out to be a complete rogue and a cad, it may be necessary for the heroes to spring into action and rescue the hapless member of their group who is being forced to walk down the aisle. (Of course, being Big Damn Heroes, they'll have to do so in the most overblown and dramatic way possible.) Sometimes, the person in the arranged marriage takes matters into their own hands and becomes a Runaway Fiancé. The "aggrieved" party may claim Breach of Promise of Marriage in response, as arranged marriages tend to be viewed as legally binding commitments by those who initiate it. Alternately, there's a Love Triangle. The character of the suitor is less likely to be important in those cases, but they generally won't look kindly on the outsider's interference. Conversely, an Arranged Marriage can be used to lock the hero and heroine together so that their disputes can not end with one of them washing their hands of the other. A common tactic is for the daughter of a wealthy but common family to be matched with the Impoverished Patrician, for his title: Nobility Marries Money. Occasionally, it's the other way around, with a titled daughter and a moneyed son. Families may even pledge infant children in marriage pacts that cannot be concluded until many years later. Both in fiction and in Real Life, royal children (sons as well as daughters) were used as pawns in the political game cementing alliances and peace treaties with their marriages. You might say it was their job to take part in such Altar Diplomacy. The Arranged Marriage is not to be confused with: a Childhood Marriage Promise (whereby a prepubescent couple voluntarily pledges their own non-legally-binding, future troth); a marriage which may arise out of convenience; or a marriage that arises from some kind of cultural mistake. For clarity's sake, the Arranged Marriage trope will deal only with more binding, traditional types of unions. See also Parental Marriage Veto, You Have Waited Long Enough, Old Man Marrying a Child, Homosocial Heterosexuality, Royal Inbreeding, and Marriage Before Romance. A Shotgun Wedding is a short-notice forced marriage. If someone agrees to an Arranged Marriage but loves someone else, Courtly Love may be involved. If the people doing the "arranging" in the marriage aren't the parents, that's a Bureaucratically Arranged Marriage. Often involves Prince Charmless and Rebellious Princess. At least recently, one of the potential spouses was as likely as not to try to defy this. When the audience really doesn't want this marriage, expect the Big Damn Heroes to show up right at the Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace line. To see the types of follies and foibles associated with modern dating services, see Dating Service Disaster. Supertrope to Perfectly Arranged Marriage. Subtrope of Marriage of Convenience. Contrast Marry for Love. Compare And Now You Must Marry Me. Compare and contrast Fourth Date Marriage, where the couple likewise barely knows each other but it was Love at First Sight.

#18. Halice (Hal Cooper & Alice Cooper; ROMANTIC TROPE: AWFUL WEDDED LIFE)

Awful Wedded Life

Take it from me Spaghetti Man, better dead than wed."— Richie Tozier, IT

The depiction of monogamous marriage as rather like a long, slow, exquisite torture by a sadistic god from whose malicious clutches escape is impossible. Husbands are child-like buffoons who watch too much football, leave the toilet seat up, ogle hot women, and forget anniversaries. Wives are frigid, nagging, hateful shrews with zero interest in sex. Children destroy your home and what little peace of mind you have left, while waiting their turn to perpetuate the cycle. Obnoxious In-Laws serve to add to the misery. The audience may be left wondering, "Why don't they just get a divorce, if they're so miserable?" Married... with Children was probably the first time this trope was the main focus of an American sitcom, but it's been a mainstay of British shows since The '50s. It is also a staple of Borscht Belthumour, but that may be less to do with venom than with Jews Love to Argue or Jewish Complaining. The name, for those who don't get it, is a reference to the line of the traditional wedding vows, "Lawful wedded wife". Similar to No Accounting for Taste, but you'll rarely (if ever) see the Aww, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other moments occasionally found in that trope. Compare The Masochism Tango, Belligerent Sexual Tension, Like an Old Married Couple, Dead Sparks, and Married Too Young. Contrast Happily Married for the opposite and Happy Marriage Charade for when this trope pretends to be Happily Married. Unfortunately, Truth in Television for many people until quite recently, in eras with some combination of marriages being arranged for family advantage (or some other type of Marriage of Convenience) rather than created by mutual attraction, divorce being impossible or hugely disapproved of, or unintentional pregnancy leading to a choice of marriage or social ostracism.

#17. Fralice (Fred Andrews & Alice Cooper; ROMANTIC TROPE: AW, LOOK! THEY REALLY DO LOVE EACH OTHER)

Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other

When a couple/potential couple — who spend the entirety of the show yelling at each other, insulting one another, stabbing each other in the back, etc. — have a moment when they reveal that, deep down, they really care for one another. Awwww. Often takes place in a humorous rushing-to-your-spouse's-defense manner, where one of them angrily defends the other against the same kind of insults that they themselves like to dish out. The common line is: "Nobody insults/beats up/threatens my wife, husband, boyfriend, girlfriend but me!" If this relation is between friends then they are Vitriolic Best Buds. If it is between siblings, then it either combines Big Brother Bully and Big Brother Instinct or is Thicker Than Water. If the romance part comes without warning or justification, the trope may fall flat, since it comes out of nowhere when the previous context of the story makes it seem like they have nothing to love about each other. When couples don't even have these moments you get No Accounting for Taste. See also Defrosting Ice Queen, Slap-Slap-Kiss and Belligerent Sexual Tension. A couple version of a Pet the Dog moment.

#16. Halelope (Hal Cooper & Penelope Blossom; ROMANTIC TROPE: YOUR CHEATING HEART)

Your Cheating Heart

"Your cheatin' heart will make you weep, You'll cry and cry and try to sleep. But sleep won't come the whole night through, Your cheatin' heart will tell on you."—Hank Williams ( "Your Cheatin' Heart”)

Two-timing, playing away from home, having a bit on the side, going behind your partner's back, adultery, infidelity... There are a lot of names for cheating on your partner, but most of them have the same outcome: a world of hurt. Most of us recognize this type of plot: Bob is married to Alice. One day, Bob sees Carol at a club and is attracted to her. Perhaps things haven't been going so well with Alice for some time. Maybe they just had a major fight and Bob stormed off. Or maybe his marriage is perfectly healthy, and Bob has no excuse. Whatever the reason, Bob flirts with Carol, which eventually leads to a sexual or romantic relationship and the various things that entails. But here's the thing: Bob doesn't tell Alice about it. He doesn't dump her, he doesn't tell her that he thinks the marriage is on the rocks, he doesn't talk to her about Polyamory or swinging, he doesn't even ask for "more space". He continues to play the part of her husband, and expects her to continue being his wife, hoping that Alice won't notice when he starts coming in late for dinner, or ask him about the mysterious expenditures on their joint account. Sometimes, just to really play Alice for a sucker, their marriage will seemingly improve— he buys Alice gifts, pays attention to her and seems much happier, but all the while he's running off to see Carol. For extra scumbag points, he may be keeping Carol similarly in the dark about Alice. Chances are he'll eventually get caught; if he didn't, the story wouldn't have the same dramatic impact. A lot of angst and tension will ensue. Way back in the day, when marriage was considered permanent and divorce was a word whispered fearfully by gossiping old ladies, The Affair was a shocker of a storyline, and very often an automatic Moral Event Horizon for the cheating partner. However, it's worth noting that even further back in the day, the gods, goddesses and minor side characters of mythology listed "infidelity" under "Hobbies", didn't particularly care if their new "partner" was willing, and got away with it. Only their mortal lovers got the nasty side of the wronged wife's/husband's temper when the affair was discovered. Nowadays, affairs are common in any Soap Opera and turn up an awful lot in other types of story as well. We don't really expect a fictional husband and wife to stay faithful to each other for forty or so years. Supposedly, a solid marriage makes a boring story (though some would disagree). Often, a sequence of "get together → one cheats → they break up → they make up → the other one cheats", and so on) will be followed so often and so tiresomely that it becomes a Yoyo Plot Point. What defines cheating usually depends on the context of the story and the characters involved. Stories aimed at younger audiences, or with a clear emphasis on romantic, monogamous relationships, will probably count kissing and flirting as cheating. Most examples of cheating in shows aimed at adults, however, will involve sex. Occasionally, characters may clash specifically because they have different definitions of cheating: for example, the husband who protests that he was drunk and it was "just a kiss" to his furious wife, or a girlfriend who can't understand why her boyfriend doesn't like her flirting with her male friends. A few rules usually hold true in fiction: If a woman cheats, her paramour just scored a massive victory over her cuckolded husband, who is now permanently dishonored. The (male) big boss of any given workplace is likely to be two-timing his wife. The Protagonist remains sympathetic if they cheat, and becomes an innocent, wronged victim if they are the one being cheated on. Bisexuals are portrayed as incapable of faithfulness or have merely informed sexuality, and men are more prone to having affairs than women (and often portrayed as The Unfair Sex too when it comes to cheating). Unfortunately, adultery is Truth in Television, as many broken hearts and broken families will testify. It is also one of the most common reasons that people murder each other.

#15. Fladys (FP Jones & Gladys Jones; ROMANTIC TROPE: OUTLAW COUPLE)

Outlaw Couple

Two lovers who team up to commit crime, usually violent crime and especially robbery, and are usually on the run from the law. Such couples are almost always inspired by Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, "Bonnie & Clyde." Which one is the brains of the outfit tends to vary from couple to couple. Sometimes one is a calm and collected criminal who charms the other into a life of crime. Other times, one is a loose cannon while the other is a cool-headed professional. Many Bonnie and Clyde stories end in tragedy, as did the original couple. This one is Truth in Television, though it should be noted that most fiction tends to romanticize the life of crime that such characters tend to lead. Compare/contrast Minion Shipping. See Unholy Matrimony for a more over-the-top, super powered version of this team-up. Expect some Back-to-Back Badasses moments, as well as a selfish suicide if one partner dies. May result in sympathetic villains or even Sympathetic Murderers, especially if their affection for each other is given the spotlight.

#14. Hiramione (Hiram Lodge & Hermione Lodge; ROMANTIC TROPE: UNHOLY MATRIMONY)

Unholy Matrimony

Poison Ivy: Once you have frozen mankind, these babies will overrun the globe, and we shall rule them, for we will be the only two people left in the world. Mr. Freeze: Adam and Evil.—Batman & Robin

You know how the story goes, right? Big Bad meets Baroness, Baroness meets Big Bad, their eyes meet, and horribly discordant music that sounds not unlike the screaming of tortured souls arise. It's black magic... a match made in hell! Lord Worldbreaker and Lady Firestorm are, individually, serious threats to the heroes, but what happens if they're suddenly working intimately together? That's when it gets really dangerous. A pair of villains capable of channeling The Power of Love is enough to give even the most hardened group of heroes a serious challenge, and worse yet, seeing the villains in love may make them doubt their own motivations. Should one of the villains fall, the other one grieving over their fallen lover is quite likely to initialize an Alas, Poor Villainscenario, and maybe even a My God, What Have I Done? Should another villain start messing with the happy couple, it's usually played as a Kick the Dog moment. ...of course, these people are villains, so you can never really be sure that one or both of them isn't just playing at being in love, in order to manipulate and use the other. If the love is genuine but unrequited, expect the one who genuinely loves to sacrifice their life to protect the other, only for the other to disdainfully ignore them as they lie dying, proclaiming that they're no longer useful. Usually, this signals a crossing of the Moral Event Horizon. If both were faking it, expect them to show their true colors at the same time. Hilarity Ensues—and it's never mentioned ever again. The most classic version of this trope occurs when two previously established antagonists suddenly take a new-found interest in each other, but it can also involve a newcomer falling for an established villain, or even a pair of villains who were, from the beginning, a "villainous couple". In the first-mentioned scenario, Enemy Mine may occur in order to match the united power of the couple — which can get particularly interesting if the "bedfellow" is another villain, who is driven by jealousy...May form a Big Bad Duumvirate. Compare Villainous Friendship, when the two are truly friends with each other, but not in a romantic way. Contrast Minion Shipping (which involves minions instead of actual villains) and Mad Love (which is one-sided). Outlaw Couple is the petty crime version of this. In the case of fiction with multiple villains where taking two out of the equation would still leave a bunch of bad guys, if it's genuine on both sides this can be used as a prelude to a Heel–Face Turn or at the very least a "Get out of Jail Free" Card. If the couple in question is heterosexual, expect the man to be the more important half of the couple, possibly making her more of a Dark Mistress. Subtrope of Even Evil Has Loved Ones. Not to be confused with Awful Wedded Life, which describes the marriage itself to be terrible, not the people involved.

#13. Formione (FP Jones & Hermione Lodge; ROMANTIC TROPE: WELL, EXCUSE ME, PRINCESS! & FOE ROMANCE SUBTEXT)

Well, Excuse Me, Princess!

"Why must everything you say to me sound like a criticism?"— Robin Hood to Marian (BBC's Robin Hood)

Snarky loser hero meets snarky haughty heroine. They either fall in love, or they snark. Usually both. This is essentially a satire of the standard Magical Girlfriend, which describes a beautiful, classy, good-mannered, loyal girl—the logical result being she should be somewhat critical of her loser boyfriend. She makes no attempt to ignore the fact that he is the Loser Protagonist, and frequently calls him on it, criticizes him, and rarely if ever fawns over him like some Fangirl. She expects better from him and pushes him to improve, while still expecting to be taken care of. However, the guy usually takes it in stride, mocks her in return, or just says the trope title. Expect a generous helping of Aww, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other moments, to let the audience know why they should be supporting this couple. The idea is that the snarky loser will help the princess loosen up and be friendlier, while the princess constantly holding the loser to a higher standard will eventually make him improve himself. Often appears in Love Comedies, depending on how satirical the story is. See also Tsundere. Related to Belligerent Sexual Tension. Compare/Contrast Screw You, Elves! and Surrounded by Idiots. If it involves an actual Princess Princess, see Royal Brat. The Woman Wearing the Queenly Mask can make similar demands.

Foe Romance Subtext

"Thou hast beat me out Twelve several times, and I have nightly since Dreamt of encounters 'twixt thyself and me; We have been down together in my sleep, Unbuckling helms, fisting each other's throat, And waked half dead with nothing."— Aufidius to his blood enemy, Act 4, Scene 5, Coriolanus

The implications of sexual tension between arch-enemies. Just as Ho Yay is about the situation of implying romance where even the characters' canonical sexual orientations make it implausible, this trope intentionally creates an even deeper paradox by subtextually implying love in a relationship that is, textually, the opposite of love. This trope is much more likely to come into play if one is The Rival and The Only One Allowed to Defeat You, or a Rival Turned Evil, and is especially likely if one is an Evil Former Friend. If enemies have to work together, it can give the impression that adversity makes strange bedfellows. Other times, this trope can be invoked by a villain who seems to be too eager and persistent about trying to convince or force the hero to rule the world together, and eventually appear as a one-sided Villainous Crush. Terms of Endangerment often feature, and watch out for the "Take That!" Kiss. Dark Magical Girls are often depicted as understanding their Magical Girl counterpart far more than anyone else, and after inevitable redemption at the very least become Heterosexual Life-Partners, if not more. Since most heroes and their villains tend to be the same gender, this results in most examples of Foe Yay overlapping with Ho Yay, but different gender foes qualify too. When it ultimately goes from subtext to text, and the two admit that they love each other, it is called Dating Catwoman. Contrast with Defecting for Love. For the villain who really is sexually obsessed with The Hero, see Stalker with a Crush, Mind Game Ship, In Love with Your Carnage, and Villainous Crush. See also Destructo-Nookie, when they actually do go the whole nine yards. See also Foe Yay Shipping, for the subjective audience reaction of insisting that after a certain number of such scenes, the two should become a couple (this appeal often lies in the forbidden nature of the relationship, a staple of the shipper diet). Please move non-objective examples to that page. Not to be confused with Faux Yay.

#12. Fredmione (Fred Andrews & Hermione Lodge; ROMANTIC TROPE: RICH SUITOR, POOR SUITOR)

Rich Suitor, Poor Suitor

"One of them is dark and poor One fair with lots of money I don't know which one to choose The flower or the honey"—Celtic Woman ("At the Ceili")

One of the most common complications in the classic Love Triangle scenario. Two men are vying for a women's affection. Who's the right one? It's hard to tell, but there's a good chance that one of them is considerably wealthier than the other, and he can provide security, glamour and the good life, while the other (who has a good chance of being an impoverished artist) can give none of the same. What are you gonna do? Most of the time, it's going to be "go with the poor one," and the story will carry an Aesop that true love is worth more than material wealth. This makes sense if the rich one is a total bore or outright jackass, or the woman is just not in love with him as she is with the broke one. When done poorly, the rich one often ends up as the Designated Villain. This trope overlaps considerably with Wrong Guy First and Disposable Fiancé, but keep in mind that the rich suitor is not necessarily wrong, first or particularly disposable. This trope is most often "two men and one women" because of a sense that woman needs someone to 'provide for her'. This sort of logic ties into Unable to Support a Wife and generates part of this trope's conflict. If the suitors are also a Betty and Veronica pair, the dynamic will typically be either "poor but nice suitor vs. rich but haughty suitor" or "poor but exciting suitor vs. rich but boring suitor", being obviously slanted toward the poor suitor in both cases. In fact, having the rich suitor win or even be a decent, likeable person is a rare variation of this trope.note Perhaps the trope name should have been "Poor Suitor Wins" instead? The odd exception can happen though, with the rich suitor being a nice, decent person and the poor suitor being a male Gold Digger. Compare Gold Digger, Meal Ticket, and Uptown Girl. It can involve Compete for the Maiden's Hand.

End of Part I. Please check out Part II!

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