#but also bc i wanted to try and see if i could play with tower shields

[devilofthehounds]

[image id: The top of the image has black text on a white background reading “The research originated at Anagura, after all.” Below that is a still, three-panel rendition of the “Blinking White Guy” meme. /end id]

Was anybody gonna tell me the Far East Branch has a name besides "The Far East Branch"?

Anyway, if there's an official localization for "Anagura", let me know because I couldn't find one instance in all of Resurrection and Rage Burst.

Edit: Turns out "Anagura" is the equivalent of the localization using "the Den". See the notes for details.

[itneverendshere]

you going to jj’s little graduation, and you’re giving proud mom. even if he’s towering over you in his cap, and you’re pinching his cheeks, and as always rafes in awe of how much of natural caretaker

i'm a sucker for these three dynamic 😭😭😭😭 so i also added a little kie bc jj deserves all the teasing in the world after he made rafe's life miserable the past year🤭 hope you enjoy!🩵🫂

you've got no reason to be afraid - r.c

pairing: rafe x pogue!reader (bartender!reader universe)

Rafe never wanted to go to this thing.

No, really. It wasn’t even one of those "I don’t wanna go, but deep down I actually care" moments. He genuinely didn’t want to show up.

Because honestly, why the hell was he going to JJ Maybank's graduation?

You dragged him here, and yeah, he was pretending to hate it every second of it, but...okay, maybe he was…a little proud of the guy for making it out alive. Sue him.

You’re buzzing around like a proud mom, and it’s almost hard to look at. Not because it’s annoying—okay, maybe it’s a little annoying—but more because it’s… god, he doesn’t even know. It’s just you.

You can’t help it. The whole natural caretaker thing, how you swoop in and take care of people like you’re born to do it. 

Rafe’s leaning against the wall while you’re annoying JJ, pinching his cheeks like he's still that scrappy little kid you saved from his old man’s rage. His stupid graduation cap keeps sliding off his head, and every time you fix it, he grins like an idiot.

The guy's taller than you, but it’s almost like it doesn’t matter. 

"You’re not gonna cry, are you?" JJ teases, standing there in his cap and gown like some kinda of scholar. It's hard to take it seriously, to be honest. 

You roll your eyes at him, "Shut up, Maybank. I’m allowed to be proud of you." You reach up again, smoothing down the collar of his gown, and it hits Rafe how much you care about this. 

He crosses his arms tighter over his chest, trying his best not to look too invested in the scene playing out in front of him. You’re still fussing over JJ, like some proud older sister at her little brother’s first big milestone, and Rafe… well, he’s trying not to roll his eyes for the third time in five minutes.

He pushes off the wall, just enough to glance at his phone, scrolling through his notifications to look busy, like he’s not watching this whole thing happen. He catches a glimpse of you laughing—JJ making some dumb joke about how he can’t believe he even graduated in the first place.

He didn’t get it at first. How could someone who’s been through what you’ve been through still have the energy to care about people like this?

Especially about someone like JJ? The scrappy, no-good kid from The Cut who spent more time getting into fights and drinking than actually passing his classes. But that’s the thing about you—you never gave up on people, even when everyone else had.

"You’re staring," you tease, glancing back at him with a grin, breaking his train of thought. "You okay over there, baby?"

Rafe straightens up, wiping the expression off his face before you can see too much. He’s quick to shrug, playing it off like he’s too cool to care about whatever’s going on. "Yeah, I’m fine," he mutters, locking his phone and slipping it back in his pocket. "Just wondering how long this is gonna take."

"Uh-huh." You’re not buying it for a second, but you let it slide. You know him better than anyone else, after all, “Get your ass here. We’re taking a picture.”

He sighs, letting out a dramatic huff like this is the worst thing he’s ever been asked to do. "You serious?" he groans, but he’s already pushing himself off the wall and walking over to where you’re standing with JJ.

“Dead serious,” you shoot back, giving him that look—the one that always gets him to do what you want, even when he’s trying to act like he’s above it.

JJ’s got that shit-eating grin on his face, the one that says he knows Rafe’s just playing tough. He slings an arm over your shoulders like it’s the most natural thing in the world, and Rafe’s eyes narrow, his possessiveness showing before he can even stop himself.

“Relaaaax, man,” JJ teases, catching the look. “You’re gonna burst a vein.”

He rolls his eyes but steps closer, standing right beside you as you hand your phone to some random kid to take the picture. The three of you huddle together and you pull Rafe in by his shirt, snuggling into his side like you always do, and despite himself, he can’t help the small smile that tugs at his lips. Not enough for anyone else to notice—he’s too stubborn for that—but you feel it.

You always do.

The camera clicks, and just like that, the moment’s captured—JJ in his stupid graduation gear, you looking like a proud mom, and Rafe standing there like he’s not sure how he ended up a part of this weird little family, but maybe, just maybe, he’s okay with it.

“Alright, picture’s done. Can we leave now?” Rafe grumbles, already half-turned toward the parking lot.

You step in front of him to block his way. “Oh no, you’re not getting off that easy. We’re going to the party.” Your voice has that no-nonsense tone, the one that makes him groan because he knows you mean business.

JJ laughs again, clapping Rafe on the back. “C’mon, man. You can survive a couple hours with us. Plus, there’s free beer.”

He arches a brow. “Free beer?”

“Yep. Keg’s already set up back at John B’s place,” JJ says, wiggling his eyebrows.

“Fine,” Rafe groans, but he doesn’t actually mind. Not when you’re looking at him like that—like he’s the only thing you want standing next to you, even if it’s at some ridiculous party in the Cut. In his little sister’s boyfriends house of all places. Sarah and John B’s on-again, off-again thing is enough drama for one lifetime.

 “But I’m not carrying your ass home when you get shitfaced.”

JJ smirks, patting his gown. “I’ll be fine, man. I graduated today. I’m an adult now.”

Rafe snorts. “Yeah, we’ll see how long that lasts.”

You’re already pulling Rafe toward the car, glancing back at JJ with a grin. “Come on. Let’s celebrate while you still have time to pretend you’re responsible.”

JJ’s talking a mile a minute, the entire drive, from the backseat, already planning out how he’s going to "run the party" and bragging about the free booze like it’s the highlight of his life. Rafe tunes most of it out, too focused on you, the warmth of your hand lingering even after you’ve let go. By the time you pull up to John B’s place, the sun’s starting to set and the yard is already half full with the Pogues. Kie’s there, Sarah too, probably.

You park, and before Rafe can even make a move, JJ’s already jumped out, tossing his cap onto the grass as he heads toward the keg. "Let’s get this party started bitches!" he shouts, and the small crowd cheers in response.

Great.

He climbs out of the car, walking around to meet you on the driver’s side. “You sure about this?” he asks, glancing toward the crowd. He’s not exactly best friends with these guys, and parties in the Cut… well, they’re not really his scene.

But you smile up at him, reaching for his hand and threading your fingers through his. "Yeah, I’m sure. You’ll survive, baby.”

He huffs, but when you start pulling him toward the party, he lets you. He always lets you. You weave your way through the small crowd of pogues, most of whom nod or wave at him but don’t bother trying to talk to him. 

You glance back, grinning as you lead the way toward the makeshift party area. “You’re not gonna hide in the corner the whole time, are you?” you tease, giving his hand a playful squeeze.

Rafe rolls his eyes but follows you, his free hand shoving into his pocket. “No promises,” he says, though a small part of him is already resigning to the fact that you’re probably going to drag him into the middle of everything by the end of the night.

Everything's already in full swing by the time you both find a spot near the keg. JJ’s surrounded by a group of people, handing out beers like it’s his personal mission to get everyone drunk. John B and Sarah are off to the side, leaning against the porch railing, sharing a laugh. Disgusting.

You flash him a smile before heading off to grab drinks, leaving him standing awkwardly near the keg, trying his best to avoid making eye contact with anyone.

He’s mid-scroll on his phone again when he hears JJ’s voice call out, “Yo, Rafe!”

Rafe glances up, already preparing himself for whatever shit JJ’s about to throw his way.

“Don’t tell me you’re just gonna stand there like some grumpy old man. You’re at my graduation party, man! You gotta at least try to have fun.” JJ’s grinning from ear to ear, clearly already a few beers in.

Rafe snorts, shaking his head. “I’m here, aren’t I? That’s gotta count for something.”

JJ laughs, clapping him on the shoulder. “Yeah, yeah. You’re right. Just didn’t think I’d see Rafe Cameron at a pogue party, y'know?”

“Don’t make me punch you in the face."

JJ grins again, but there’s something a little more genuine in his expression this time. “For real though, man. Thanks for coming. I know this isn’t your scene.”

Rafe’s about to answer with his usual sarcasm, but he catches the sincerity in JJ’s tone and decides to let it slide. He nods, his voice gruff as he says, “Yeah. Congrats, Maybank. You deserve it.”

JJ’s grin widens, and he raises his beer in a mock toast. “Thanks, man. Appreciate it.”

Before he can say anything else, you’re back with two beers in hand, nudging one toward him. “Here you go. Now you’ve got no excuse to look so miserable.”

Rafe takes the beer from you with a half-smirk, but his eyes are soft as he glances down at you. “I don’t look miserable.”

You raise an eyebrow, clearly not convinced. “Sure.”

He chuckles, taking a sip of his beer. It’s cheap, of course, and not exactly his taste, but he doesn’t complain. Not when you’re standing so close, looking up at him like you can see right through all his bullshit. He watches you for a moment, the way you light up around these people, the way you float between them like you’re the glue holding everyone together does something to his heart.

Rafe leans back, his arm draped loosely around your waist as you chat with Kie and JJ, laughing at some dumb story JJ’s telling about getting caught sneaking into class late one too many times. He can’t help but wonder how you do it. The nights you spent bailing JJ out when his dad got too wasted and violent. How you’d sneak him into your place, covering up the bruises and making sure he had somewhere to crash for the night.

“Hey,” your voice pulls him out of his thoughts. “You okay? You’re staring again.”

Rafe blinks, realizing he’s been zoning out, watching you again. “Yeah,” he mutters, clearing his throat. “Just thinking.”

You tilt your head, curiosity flickering in your eyes. “About?”

“How much I love you.”

JJ gags, “Shut the fuck up.”

Kie slaps him in the back, “Shut up, it’s cute.”

Rafe lets out a low chuckle, glancing over at JJ. "Jealous, Maybank?"

JJ takes a long swig of his beer, rolling his eyes dramatically. “Oh, please. I’m not jealous of your sappy shit.”

“Sure you’re not,” He drawls, leaning back with a smirk. “Not like you’ve been drooling over Kie all year or anythin’.”

Kie’s eyes widen, her face flushing just enough to make it obvious, “What the hell are you talking about?” She shoots Rafe a glare, but there’s no real venom behind it.

His grin only widens. “Oh, come on. You think I haven’t noticed? You two have been dancing around each other for what, months now?”

JJ chokes on his beer, coughing. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. That’s not—”

But Rafe’s not letting up. He’s enjoying this way too much. “Dude, just admit it. You’ve been into her forever, and honestly, we’re all sick of watching you act like you don’t.”

Kie crosses her arms, raising an eyebrow. “Oh, really? You’re sick of it?”

“Yeah,” Rafe deadpans, “Everyone knows. Hell, even John B probably knows, and that guy’s oblivious to everything except Sarah.”

JJ groans, rubbing his hand over his face. “You’re seriously gonna make this about me?”

“Yep,” Rafe grins, “Payback’s a bitch, huh?”

He knows Rafe’s just messing with him. He’s been down bad for Kie for as long as he can remember, but every time he gets close, something stops him. The friendship, the fear of messing it up, maybe just the fact that he doesn’t think he deserves her. Rafe’s seen it all before.

Kie, for her part, just rolls her eyes. “Boys are so fucking dumb.”

You laugh, nudging Rafe in the ribs. “Stop torturing him. It’s his big day.”

Rafe huffs, a smirk still playing on his lips. “I’m just saying, if I had to deal with all the crap about you and me, it’s only fair he gets his turn.”

“Yeah, well, maybe JJ needs a little push,” you glance between the two of them. “You gonna make a move, Maybank? Or you planning on dragging this out for another year?”

JJ looks at you, then at Kie, then back at Rafe, who’s clearly enjoying every second of this. “You guys suck,” he mutters, grabbing another beer and stalking off toward the keg, leaving Kie standing there, cheeks still a little red, though she’s doing her best to look unbothered.

Rafe watches him go, then turns back to Kie. “He’s a mess, but you already know that.”

Kie sighs, shaking her head. “Yeah, I do.” Her voice softens,“But he’s my mess, I guess.”

You smile, giving Kie a knowing look. “Took you long enough to admit it.”

Kie glares at you playfully, but there’s no hiding the tiny smile tugging at the corner of her lips. “Oh, shut up.”

[hauntdoesthings]

The Vees with Niffty-Sized Reader

A/N: trying to get back in the groove of writing with some headcanons featuring my current fixation my favorite overlords!

CW: Valentino, manhandling, minor objectification(reader is used/referred to as a doll and pet), implied manipulation and possessive behavior bc it's the Vees, that's their schtick

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Velvette

✧You are literally doll-sized for her, good luck. ✧Dress-up is not an option and she will be throwing you in very cutesy or cozy clothes regardless of your preferences. ✧”They’re just too perfect on you, doll.” OK but where did she even get a bear onesie in Hell? ✧The entire thing is her personal stress-reliever, she gets to do you up however she likes while bitching about whatever faux pas her assistants came up with that week. ✧If you are as high-energy as Nifty, she has a very low tolerance for that. ✧You may be able to get away with running around her department while she’s occupied with prep work, but you better sit still while she’s playing with you unless you want to receive a very harsh reminder that, while she may be the youngest, she is no less than an Overlord, or have you forgotten that, doll?

Valentino

✧*cough*Size kink*cough* ✧Moving on, I actually don’t think shorties are his usual thing. We tend to see him more with taller, lanky people, legs for days kinda energy, but he can’t say your size doesn’t have it’s charms. ✧He absolutely loves to just hold you. Can’t keep up with his tall-ass strides? Wandering too far for his liking? Literally just existing nearby? You’re getting scooped up like nothing at all. Mans has four arms for a reason, so he’s just carrying you around like a handbag or purse pet. ✧Also uses it as a chance to show you off like the pet you are because who else can say they have such a little cutie at their beck and call? ✧Do not mention that you’re shared amongst the Vees or he might just forget he’s holding you as he focuses on holding back a tantrum.

Vox

✧”Jokingly” puts a tracker on you. He doesn’t like that you’re small enough to easily hide in his cameras’ blind spots. ✧Man is so anxious over and protective of you. You could literally be chewed up and spit out by anyone down here, wouldn’t you rather just stay where he can keep you safe and keep a watchful eye on you? ✧Doesn’t really pick you up to hold you like Val but will just grab you by the scruff of your neck to basically manhandle you around. Dragging you away from cables you could trip over, moving you to where he wants you to just sit and wait for him, that kind of thing. ✧Someone help you if you ever run into Alastor. Vox practically turns into a football player or something the way he just yoinks you up and books it. You’re stuck under house arrest for two-weeks at least, it doesn’t matter if you were talking with him or just existing with eyeshot. ✧And no, he doesn’t mean whatever shithole you’re staying in. You’ll be staying in the Vees’ Tower, where they can keep you out of the trouble you always seem to find yourself in. It’s really all for your sake, so he’s really doing you a favor, ḏ̴̉o̵̗͊n̷̜͛'̴̹̓t̷̞͐ ̷̯́y̶̹̒ỏ̷̥ų̸͠ ̴͇͆a̵̢̎g̴̪̈ŕ̴̲e̷͈̅ę̷͠?̵̀ͅ

[nqify]

AHHH I’m so happy I found ur quaritch account! I’ve been dying in lack of quaritch fics so tysm for ur service. I was fed. Also headcannon for quaritch w a shy/ naturally submissive reader? I feel like he be surprised to someone NOT being a brat against him. If u wanna, ty and have a great day?

GIRL U ARE ONTO SMTH AND I LOVE IT!! shy!sub s/o headcanons. — miles quaritch ☆

pairings. na’vi!miles quaritch. fem!reader

content warnings. daddy kink. lil spit play. lots of dirty talk.

note. idk if this is good or not anon!!! so if you want me to change anything feel free to ask

this guys deals with so many brats on the daily!! his coworkers, his boss, the mf Lyle. He just hates having to put people in line all the time this guys deals with so many brats on the daily!! his coworkers, his boss, the mf Lyle. He just hates having to put people in line all the time

so when he meets you, it’s like a breathe of fresh air. Your naturally submissive, listening to everything he tells you to do, “hey, y/n, could you grab that for me?” And without complaining or whining you nod your head, “yes, sir.” This dude is pussy whipped already

even without all the devils tango, just doing what he says gets him going. He’s so used to ppl not following his orders, when u come along and start submitting to him, this GUY WILL NOW PREY ON U FR

when y’all start dating, he starts to notice how easily you get shy, especially with his words, “hey pretty, how are you?” your cheeks are burning up. This dude will find smth to make you flustered. he’ll give u little neck and forehead kisses to just to see how red you get from his touch. it’s fr driving him mad.

let’s just say your sitting on his lap in public, your horny asf and this guy will not give u attention. You begin to slowly grind your ass on him, he takes notice. As much as he would love take you right then and there, he wanted to test out if you’d rlly listen to him in a situation like this.

Miles pulls you by your waist, your back now hitting his chest. you could feel his hot breathe against your ear, he nibs at it a little before going in and saying, “uh, uh baby, behave”

And your ass listens. You don’t move or fight him in that matter. This guy is shocked. His ears perk up at ur submissiveness. He most def wanna fuck u more now. He’d try to keep his cool and move to ur ear again, “such a good girl for me, guess who’s going to get a reward when they get home” YOU ARE BITCH!!..

girls!! now we getting juicy!! just imagine miles pounding into you, his cock reaching every spot, making you an absolute mess!! This fucker wanna test out the waters again!! “open ur mouth for me, ma” and ofc, as a good girl U DID!! why is this guy so stunned. This most definitely triggers smth in him, you thought he was going hard before?? yeah girl no. He’s now drilling your shit, he’s reaching in deep. Not surprised if he touching your cervix now

he brings his pointer and middle finger to your bottom lip and slightly drags your mouth open a little. and then, BOOM he spits in your mouth. and ofc, you swallow it. THE FACT that he didn’t have to tell you to do that, his dick is twitching and aching for u girl.

since u submit to him so easily, this guy WILL praise you, and I mean it. You’d be taking his dick in your mouth and this fucker will not stop being so vocal towards you, “f-fuck, good girl, such a good girl” or when it’d be your first times together and ur taking his big dick he’d just praise tf outta you, “look at you mama, making daddy so proud and letting him stretch you out, s-shit” creaming as we speak!!!.

bc ur ass is so shy, he will try anything and I mean anything to get you all flustered in the bed room!! this means with his words, his touch, his movements! ANYTHING .

he’ll have u spread out on the bed, hair all messy and ur lips all puffy and pink. Your hands would be covering your face, hiding your embarrassment as you laid there, fully naked. And ofc, miles would be towering over you, this guy is 9’5 for god sake!! Even though he’s seen you naked so many times, He’d still find it so so cute how flustered you are.

He would grab both your hands and pin them above your head,“no need to be so shy baby, lemme see all of you” his tail is wagging like a dog at this point. He secretly likes how u get so shy, the fact that he gets to ruin it MAKES HIM BOOMBOOM baby making time.

bc this guy is a certified dirty talker, he will and I REPEAT!!!, he will say shit to make you embarrassed.

Y’all are literally in public and this fucker becomes behind you, grinds his bugle into your back and says, “can’t wait to fuck this pretty pussy when we get home” u froze. or when he’s annoying you a lil and you just can’t help whining out, “miles, ur so annoying” he be grinning. “that’s not what u said last night baby” get ready for him to mock tf outta you, “weren’t you all like, ah, ah, pls daddy, feels so good!!??” “want more!! ah! so big fuck” ur so fucking embarrassed now omg.

one last thing, eye contact. this fucker loves it - rlly gets the gears going. So when he’s eating your pretty pussy and looks up at you with half-lidded eyes, U GO CRAZY. you try to not look back at him, constantly dragging your gaze to smth else. But oh no, he will not take that

he pulls away from your pussy and grabs your chin, “look at me baby, cmon I know you love it - don’t you like it when daddy fucks you with his tongue?? you don’t want me to make u cum, huh?” your 100% looking at him now. like girl.

requests are still open!! don’t be shy, gimme ur fantasies rn!!!!

[babyjakes]

flamingo pink.

〈 disclaimer: this blog posts content not suitable for individuals under the age of 18. minors are strictly prohibited from viewing, sharing, or interacting with this blog. for more information on this blog's commitment to protecting minors, read our full statement here. 〉

event | kinkmas 2023

prompt | pet play

pairing | daddy!ari levinson x puppy!reader

warnings | ddlg and pet play elements (daddy!ari and sort of little? puppy!reader.) brief mentions of ownership; reader wears a collar. unprotected sex- vaginal and anal penetration. mild clit play (mild for me anyway lol.) nipple play for like one (1) second. finger sucking. squirting (and he comes in her ass!) a little bit of crying. teasing. some mocking/humiliation. some dumbification. lots of praise/encouragement. beginnings of aftercare.

word count | 1,006

an | hi sluts, welcome to kinkmas 2023!! i'm so super excited to be running this event, i've already put in a lot of work on these pieces and i'm really hoping you'll all enjoy them <3 as a quick note, if you haven't already, make sure to check out the event masterlist (linked above) to see the list of prompts i'll be writing for this month! i tried to pick mostly new ideas and concepts, hopefully there'll be something to fit everyone's taste!! hope you all like day 1 with big strong daddy!ari and his little baby puppy! also yes there are 1989tv references bc this is MY kinkmas and I MAKE THE RULES hehe :))

Clink clink.

The rattling sound of your custom-fit collar's tiny tag could barely be heard over your and your daddy's mix of heavy breathing. Large hands gripping your ankles, Ari had your legs bent up at an obscene angle as you lay on your back against the soft white bedding below. "Fuck, puppy. Look so pretty, takin' all of me like this. What a good girl," you were melting into the towering man's touch as he brought up a few rough fingers to caress your cheek, warm with wanting.

Ari's gaze traveled over your glistening body, spread out perfectly before him like a feast to be devoured. The glimmering shine of your gold tag caught his eye, eliciting a deep groan from within him as he brought his hand down to gently turn over the small, heart-shaped plate against your neck. "All fuckin' mine," he all but growled as the pads of his fingers traced over the letters that spelled out his initials. It was more than a symbol of love; it carried a heavier weight- ownership.

He rutted up harder into you, his punishing pace drawing tears from your eyes as his gaze settled back on your precious features. "Baby," he murmured, softening slightly at the sight of your tears. "Bein' such a good little pup for me, c'mon- show me you can take it. Are you gonna be good and take Daddy's dick?"

You were gasping as he thrust up against your sweet spot repeatedly, the sensation of him stretching you open causing goosebumps to prickle up along the back of your neck. You shivered, trying to construct an acceptable response. Smiling at the sight of you being fucked stupid, your loving daddy helped you by bringing his hand back up to cup your cheek and jaw, his thumb slipping in between your glossy pink lips as he forced out a nod from you. "Good girl," he crooned as you mindlessly nursed his thick digit, your tongue rolling sloppily around its tip as he tightened his grip on you. "That's it, baby. Just let Daddy do all the thinkin'. Nothin' but a dumb little puppy for Daddy to play with- isn't that right? You're my pretty little puppy?"

You didn't need his help to nod this time, your eyelashes batting so sweetly as his grin spread further across his face. When he slowed the movement of his hips, you were a bit confused as Ari pulled out of you, bringing his hands down to guide the tip of his massive length to trail cruelly over your messy folds. You let out the cutest little whine, your thighs flailing weakly as he bumped himself right up against your puffy button.

"I know baby, I know," your daddy hummed, wanting to draw out his teasing as much as he could force himself to. "Just wanna take my time with you, sweetheart. You're such a pretty little puppy, you know that?" He brought a hungry hand up to paw at one of your breasts as it sat so perfectly beneath the flimsy fuchsia lace he had dressed you up in. Pinching and rolling your hardened nipple through the sheer fabric, he chuckled as you squirmed softly under his touch. "My perfect little pup, so pretty in pink. Makin' it hard for me to control myself, baby. S'hard to be gentle with you when you're this fuckin' cute."

When you felt his smooth tip nudging up against your smaller hole, you let out a squeak in surprise; being the good daddy he was, Ari was quick to reassure you. "Don't worry, pretty girl. Daddy won't make it hurt, just relax..." His fingers collected plenty of your wetness, dragging it down to prep his length for you. "Deep breath, angel. There," he gasped along with you as the head of his member pushed past your tight ring of flesh, the intrusion burning deep in your tummy.

"That's my good girl," Ari kept praising you proudly as he gradually worked you open, only giving you as much as you could handle. One of his thumbs came up to brush over your swollen clit, the pad of his skilled finger tracing circles over the hardened nub as a way to soothe the heat of the stretch. "You gonna be a good little pup and take all of me, princess? Gonna let me ruin this tight little bottom? Fuck-"

"D-Daddy," you mumbled, your gaze growing hazy as the pressure in your tummy expanded. Nearing the brink himself, Ari knew the signs of your impending orgasm like the back of his hand.

"C'mon, puppy. Give it to me." Forehead drenched in sweat, the man furrowed his brow harshly in concentration as he flicked his thumb faster over your aching button. "Come for Daddy, baby. Come for me, shit, that's it-" Like waves colliding, your climaxes both hit at once, glorious and gruesome in the way they made your bodies explode in tandem. As your high squirted out forcefully against the large man's front, his heavy release was shooting up into you, filling you with an indescribable warmth.

Seconds passed that felt like minutes. When your eyes finally fluttered open again, your legs were trembling uselessly off to either side of you as your chest rose and fell sporadically. You felt something leaving you, the harsh tug on your sensitive walls pulling a diminished cry from your hoarse throat.

"Shhh," your daddy's familiar voice soothed, a gentle hand rubbing careful circles on your knee. "I'm here, baby. Daddy's here. You did so well." In an instant, he was collecting you in his arms. He moved you away from the edge of the bed, propping you up against a few pillows as his lips came down to press against your dampened forehead.

"Now you just wait here, sweetheart. Daddy's gonna go get a rag to clean you up. Just close your eyes, baby. There," seeing your exhaustion, he didn't want to make you lift a single finger. "Daddy's here, angel. Daddy'll take care of you."

[koinotame]

word count: 1.7K content warnings: general yandere content warnings and allusions to nsfw/sex but nothing super explicit

summary: it's your birthday!!!! what it's like celebrating with my ocs

a/n: i can now legally drink in a country i'll never visit 🎉 + bc i'm feeling nice another sneak peek of the new guys as well

gacha isekai group:

first prince: only finds out after your birthday has passed because he's still doing the hot and cold act and genuinely breaks down crying. is lucid enough to realise maybe you're trying to be discreet so only hosts an elaborate dinner for the two of you instead of a national banquet and a barrage of gifts he think you'd enjoy

first hero: terrible gift giver who spends the entire day fussing over you. holds open doors, carries all your things, flexes when you ask because you like his muscles even if he's burning from how embarrassed he is, reminds you you could do anything to him and he'd still love you forever and ever and ever and— and so on

second hero: between the fact that you're almost definitely already overwhelmed from your entire harem and you treat (unfortunately most of your harem and not just) him like an object anyway, he doesn't dare get close on the actual day. a couple days later he just kind of silently presses something small but meaningful into your hands and wishes you a happy belated birthday. you pat him on the head dismissively and send his stomach soaring, but you look happy with it so it was worth spending his entire month's salary on

vampire: shows up in your bedroom in the morning dressed in basically nothing except a rose in his mouth and offers himself to you. he's your toy any day anyway but you can make extra use of him today… when this doesn't land he's distraught and attempts to make it up to you by buying you some really extravagant tools or materials you'll make use of

werewolf: doesn't have much to offer, so… you mentioned you were interested in seeing his true form a while ago, right? do you… want to see that now? he'd tower over you like this if he wasn't so busy rolling up at your feet and showing you his tummy. you can take him out on a walk with a leash, humanoid or true form, but to be fair you could do that any day

playboy: his gifts are surprisingly practical; think something like a water canteen or some very soft, very fluffy towels. he takes you out on a little tea party date as well, ready with all your favourite pastries, then offers to play and/or sing you a couple songs. overall focuses on giving you a nice, calm couple hours, partially because he loves you and partially because he's trying to cement himself as the better, more thoughtful option lol

immortal: brings you breakfast and surprises you with several hand sewn, incredibly sturdy and very much your style pieces of clothing. since your own had been getting a little ragged, and you complimented his sewing once… see, this one's even in the style of your clothes from back home! seeing how you've been homesick lately, he thought he could alleviate that a little for you. and if you'd really like him to, he could give you a kiss as a gift too…

living doll: since they don't technically have any living expenses, the army just kind of… doesn't pay them… so they don't have much to work with for gifts and frankly they don't really get the point of celebrating something like the day you were born on, but they let you dress them up really nicely and offers to match so they can at least make you look better throughout the day

lab experiment: gives you a handwritten light collection (it's a whole book) of poems and little pieces of art they've made of and/or for you. the contents are kind of concerning but the gesture is really sweet. also gets you some pressed flowers and your favourite treats, then ends up rushing back to their room to hide because they're worried none of this is enough for you

mage's apprentice: spends the week before your birthday asking you strange questions and hiding away in their atelier. you don't see much of them on the actual day until the evening when they shakily wish you a happy birthday and drag you out to the gardens, where they've prepared a special fireworks show just for you

disgraced god: doesn't know it's your birthday at first because the concept is kind of entirely foreign to them, but is not about to be outshined by the rest of your harem. they're always at your beck and call anyway, but they make sure to up the doting (and monopolise you as much as possible) to the max on your special day

servant: it's not really his intention, but he ends up coming off as if he's trying to prove what a good husband he'd make to you. he gets you some trinkets you've been eyeing for a while, but also some of the officials who'd been giving you a hard time recently have seemingly vanished off the face of the world and he seems extra proud of himself today…

otome game group:

crown prince: national banquet!!! no i'm serious he throws an incredibly extravagant banquet for you. his father isn't super pleased about the misuse of funds but allows it since the two of you will be married soon anyway. gets you so many gifts it's a little scary. at least one of those is a collar and leash he wants you to put around his neck and absolutely wants you to dig in to him

heroine: doesn't really have the financial means to get you much, so instead she invites you to meet her family and spend the day in her house. apologises for how it's not much but expresses how happy she is that you're willing to spend the day with her and makes sure to cook all your favourites

villainess: invites you to spend the entire week surrounding your birthday at her estate, and then spends literally every single day celebrating your birthday, including daily banquets and a massive pile of gifts. expressing worry that this is too much just makes her go harder, because clearly you don't understand how important you are to her and spoiling you more will fix this

1: not to worry! he's already chased off your three persistent noble suitors, so you can spend all day at your own leisure. and if you're upset—either at the hassle with the other three, or at his actions—well, you can always take it out on him? he's already always there, but like today he really turns up the doting. overjoyed when you push him out of the way while pulling on his hair at one point

2: pools together some of his savings to buy you a nice piece of jewellery. presents it to you shyly when you have a moment to yourself and offers to take you out to a restaurant if you're willing to sneak out… or you can have him in the comfort of your bedroom, if you'd like

3: just kind of shows up at your estate with a bouquet, a couple handmade plushies in what they hope are your favourite animals and some blessed protective charms. if they have reason to believe you'd react well, they might as well just straight up offer themself. not in a sexual way (unless you want it to be), you just own every part of them already so if it pleases you you might as well make it official

4: playing 4d chess with the crown prince and villainess to ensure she's the only one who gets to celebrate with you on your birthday. takes you out on a fun day to the capital, where she gets to buy you tons of gifts and also play the role of your personal princely knight

5: can't take the day off (spends a long time bemoaning this) but since it's customary for you to stop by his place of work for your birthday anyway he decides he'll just give you your gift then. gives you a very professional congratulatory speech, a slightly less professional brooch set that fits you to a t, and (if he thinks you'll react positively) a considerably less professional offer for you to be the one to give him nipple piercings

misc group:

house husband: makes you take the day off work to spend it doting on you. you best believe he's spent the last couple of months saving up some money to buy you gifts so tailored to you it's almost a little creepy. also brings you breakfast in bed, bakes you the best cake you've ever had and has a reservation planned for dinner at your favourite… and is definitely the type to tell you you have one more gift to unwrap at the end of the day (it's him)

horror protagonist: lol. she bounds up to you super cheerfully and gives you the eyes of her teammate, since you said you liked them so much a bit ago… you don't question how she knows your birthday at this point. is glued to your side the entire day (though you begrudgingly admit she's less annoying than usual) and offers to cook or bake something for you. doesn't mind (at all) if you want to take your stress out on her, but… she's trying to be sweet for today

6: takes the day off from his work despite your many complaints and spends it with you, insisting it's his turn to spoil you for once. you're actually kind of impressed at how accurate his gifts are to your tastes and how he managed to get them without you noticing. it's sweet until he takes the opportunity to attempt to coax you into taking advantage of him, lingerie in your favourite colour and style and all

7: spends his entire allowance on giving you the best day possible, but he's fumbling so hard for most of it. a special limited edition for your favourite game that's not worth the money, some admittedly very soft plushies of your favourite animals, and a new bag since you'd been complaining your current one was falling apart… spends the entire day trying to hype himself up to give you a kiss but doesn't quite manage. feels terrible about how lacklustre his attempt was (despite how happy you are) and vows to himself to make the next much, much more enjoyable for you

[oh-no-its-bird]

TMA naruto au time buckle up,

Jon should get to be a half Uchiha bastard who has an infamously hard time controlling his sharingan.

His mangekyo (which he gets very very young when he accidentally leads a bully to their death at the hands of a nukenin with a love of spiders) basically acts as his beholding abilities and can allow him to compel people to sit still and answer anything he asks of them, which gets really messy when you consider a) shinobi society is built on secrets, and b) he has a really hard time turning it off

His visions absoloutley fucked but whatever bloodline his father was from seems to have caused the deterioration of his eyes to stop where it is— and is also the cause of why he has extra difficulty w it's flip switch

Anyways, Inuzuka Daisy or Hatake Daisy, I can't decide. Either way shes wolf coded as fuck and also in a similar boat of being absoloutley shit at controlling her bloodline. She and Jon are so problem child coded, and I think part of the reason she hates him as kids is bc she sees a lot of herself in him but like, at her worst. All of her issues but he just lays down and takes it when she fights tooth and nail against anyone who so much looks at her wrong. They are opposite ends of the spectrum and she's hyper aware of it

I think that when they're older they should get to go on a mission together and basically the whole coffin thing happens but with like an enemy nin w an earth chakra type.

Mmm alternatively tho, sprinkle in hints of the dreaded fears and play w the beasts and yokai of naruto canon, pull some spooky shit.

They get in over their heads, coffin happens, Jon goes back for her then we end with them both just kind of looking at eachother like "there are things in this world we can not comprehend."

Mmm, naruto version of the fears,,, that could be fun. Incorporate the bijuu maybe, idk

Anyways, Daisy hates Jon, coffin time happens and Jon escapes but then goes back for her (if she's a Hatake, this could also play interestingly w parallels to Kakashi) and they come out of the whole thing having Seen Thing(tm) and are irriversably changed and also now very much edging into co-dependant besties territory

Can u tell I'm a big fan of the Daisy and Jon besties agenda bc I so am

Moving on to the others ->

I want to say civilian Martin? I don't have much for him tbh, it'd be cool if he was like distantly related to Haku tho. Give him the cool ice mirror bloodline limit or whatever bc smthn smthn the lonely.

Mmm ok acrually hear me out: civilian Martin who's trying very hard to avoid shinobi things. He's actually a defected Kiri nin who forged a new identity for himself and fled to Konoha to start a new life after the bloodline hunts back in Kiri killed his whole family (except for Haku, but he doesn't know he's still alive) He's trying very hard to fly under the radar, but I doubt he'll succeed for long

I want him to look like all those fun lonely avatar fan arts of him w the sharp teeth, white streaked hair, dulled looking skin and kinda fishy vibes overall actually, but like he uses a seal to keep a permanant henge on him to look normal bc hes very visibly Kiri otherwise

Tim is giving me Yamanaka vibes for some reason. I like that also bc then we could possibly get him and Jon working together in T&I, which like yay parallel to how they used to work together before the archives

Sasha is giving me civilian born shinobi vibes, I think she should get to work in the hokage tower. Paper pusher with big dreams of moving up the latter and really being someone one day. She has her eyes dead set on a position in the Hokage's office

Basira is ,,, somewhere. You really can't have Daisy without her that's just illegal but I'm not too sure where to put her. Civilian born Basira kinda suits her but I'm ngl I'm kinda eyeing Nara Basira. Wait no fuck ok, Nara Basira and she was on a 3 man unit with Tim at one point, now they just need a Akimichi to complete the narashikacho trifecta there

She totally works in T&I now, or maybe with the Uchiha police force? It's like 90% Uchiha but I'm pretty sure some other clans are spotted here in there among them, and if they're not, I mean, I don't actually give a shit so .

I don't know if this is one of those aus where canon is still there but we're just adding tma characters into the mix or if it's just vague naruto setting but tma characters are our focus / replacing the main cast. But I think it's the first. If it was the second tho I'd say Elias as Danzo in a heartbeat

But since it's the first, Nara Elias who got a mysterious eye transplant years ago that seemed to have changed his personality entirley (were totally keeping the body hopping shit, rip the real Nara Elias who's been dead for years)

He's a slimy politician who works closely with Danzo

Ok so main narrative:

I'm thinking the coffin thing happens with Daisy and Jon, and now they're kind of eyes open to the existence of whatever version of the fears exist in this world. Jon is Jon and can't let sleeping dogs lie, and Daisy is Daisy and does her twitchy "there's something dangerous out there I can't control/don't know about" thing so she's really not stopping him, but she is helping him be more smart about it. Sometimes. They're both kind of lose canons tbh holy shit this is gonna be a disaster

So Jon gets kind of obsessed w whatever the FUCK that was, and Elias smells blood in the water and approaches

Idk what's going on with Elias but he's still body hopping bitch boy Jonah here. He's very involved in the fears, and he's had his eyes on Jon for a while. You see, the way that avatars manifest in Naruto world is that sometimes they'll often show their influence through bloodlines— Nara the dark, Yamanaka the beholding, Inuzuka the hunt, it's all there if you look for it.

Those in 'the know' believe that all bloodline limits came from the fears— sometimes their influence shows more than others. And very very rarley, that influence becomes a a bit more... potent, than in others.

Elias believes that Jon is one such instance of this, his strange mangekyo being so painfully and terrifyingly beholding coded, far more than his clansmen who's own mangekyo tend to branch off lightly into territories of different fears.

Jon (and Daisy, but Elias has a clear favorite here) running into such a strong instance of the buried, which is rare on its own, has only made Elias even more interested, taking it as some sort of sign that there really is something especially odd about Jon's unusually strong link to the fears.

Anyways, Elias sponsoring Jon's investigation into the fears, their links to the bijuu, how they interact with chakra and if they might truly be the source of modern bloodline limits.

Konoha secret supernatural task force (not to be confused with ROOT or ANBU) meant to monitor the fears influence in Konoha,,,

(God, of course Elias couldn't help but make his own fucking secret service in opposition to ROOT. He couldn't let Danzo upstage him)

Just like how ANBU has their shoulder seal and ROOT the tongue seal, I'm thinking their seal is a stylized eye on the back of their neck, which ofc Elias is always watching through, rip

Oh fuck, actually give me seal master Elias and his special spy seals he can watch and listen through. It's not a power thing it's just a specialization thing— he has his own eye tattoo that allows him to directly see through all his seals at any time.

Anyways we're calling this organization ARCHIVE bc I am a simple gal. Don't ask what it's supposed to stand for in verse, idk

Idk who else should be in it, or if it should be like ground up and Daisy and Jon are the first. Wait what the fuck am I saying, Gertrude and Gerry obviously. Michael Shelly too, can't forget him

Toss in Mike Crew and Jude Perry also just bc I like them. Maybe Nikola and an Aburame Jane Prentiss? But also idk if I'd want to put them in the position where they're technically working under Elias, I feel like that just doesn't fit. Better to leave them out in the wold to run into instead for conflict. Except Mike Crew, who is my favorite little guy and who should get to be here on loan from Elias' friend and Daimyo's court shinobi, Simon Fairchild

Honestly be funny if Kakashi was in it at one point just bc then he'd have been in all 3 konoha secret services and honestly? Hilarious. Someone give that guy a fucking break oh my god

Obviously Tim, Sasha, Martin and Basira all eventually join in, tho idk how. Maybe Jon is actually asked who would be a good choice for it? Jon says Tim and Daisy says Basira, then they both kinda eye Sasha who's been very fucking vocal ab needing just a chance to get her claws into the hooks of the Konoha power ladder and reccomend her too

Martin is the tricky one, I'm thinking Elias somehow finds out ab his Kiri background and has always wanted to poke more at the lonley's very visible connection to many kiri bloodlines— but Martin's in particular. So he kinda blackmails him into it, but framed in a more friendly "I'll make sure you don't have to hide anymore, I can secure your place in Konoha even with your ancestry :)"

Also maybe he was impressed by Martin's disguise seals, that'd be neat. Seal master Martin but he's Martin so he's like "Ah, I'm really not that good at it :("

(Jon is infuriated by his seemingly natural talent then even more infuriated when it becomes clear he's actual shit at most other shinobi things)

Ok so peddle it back to Mr Jonah eye fuckery Magnus here -> he was once like Jon. A man born into a clan w a link to the beholding, with a light eye themed bloodline limit. But he was born with a stronger tie to their patron than the others, strong enough to recognize they had a patron at all. And by feeding into it (don't ask me how I have no clue) he was able to strengthen that tie, gaining more power, and the ability to body hop through eyes

And he looks at Jon and wonders if he can replicate that in him. Groom him into something closer to their god, then feed him to the beholding to further his own power, which seems to have stagnated in growth.

I think also there's just a good amount of spite for ROOT and hunger for political power that he might get from ARCHIVE, and Jon is a clear fit for it, so like. Add him to the pile !!

I have a couple more vague thoughts for this -> the archive tunnels correlating to ROOT tunnels, the real Elias being childhood friends w Danzo and Hiruzen before Magnus took his body, Madara off in his cave somewhere being influenced by a Zetsu who serves the fears instead of Kaguya, etc.

But I'll leave it here for now, thank u for ur time

[https-evan2]

Cuddle hc for my boy Pavitr

Gn! Reader as usual

Tbh nothing will have to do with the hc before but it still will only be Pavitr

warnings! None just fluff like tooth rotting

btw sometimes it will say his partner or his S/O and other times You so please don’t mind that

plus English isn’t my first language so pls be nice if my grammar is off :3

•okay to start of I think he’s 100% a honeymoon hugger

• and i think everyone can agree with me on that one like:

(This is a honeymoon hug btw)

•As we see in the movie he likes to have his head on your shoulder so not really a hc

• i do think he prefers to hold his partner then be held

• but that doesn’t mean he never wants to be held

• his love language is 100% physical touch

• he also loves when you play with his hair

• he probably falls asleep very fast to

• you could literally just be cuddling for like idk 4 minutes and BOOM he’s asleep

• he slightly mumbles in his sleep

• you cannot understand a single word but it’s cute so who cares

• PLEASE put his head on your chest he will love it

• btw we all know he’s like naturally warm

• so you don’t really need a blanket. Just Pavitr

• I think that he would like to sleep on your lap if he was tired enough

^ if he does (as i previously said) PLAY. WITH. HIS. HAIR

• bc of him being spider man and and has to ya’know save people and do amazing ass shit he would of course get tired a little more often

^ which leads to more cuddling

• but who can complain i certainly wouldn’t

• tbh i think he would like cuddle position were he could look at his S/O

• like just look and admire them and you just look at each other with heart eyes

• plus he was probably very affectionate before you got together

• like he would be close to you hug you (try to) hold your hand when you were sitting next to each other

• tbh i dont think he cares if your taller or even towering over him he will insist on being the big spoon

• anyway 10/10 cuddle bud definitely recommend

[askinkiskarma]

Hii idk if you take requests rn but if you do can you please write something where you are showing Neteyam music videos from earth on a tv in the lab and when your celebrity crush appeared you said « he so hot » forgetting that Neteyam was there and he fuck us bc he is jealous (like he didn’t know what your type in human were so he is possessive) 😩😩😩

IS IT TIME FOR JEALOUS NETEYAM PART 2? I THINK IT IS BESTIES!

this got away from me, the horny is taking me over once more (she says on a daily basis) also it's 12am and i'm too tired to proofread so if you see any mistakes, pretend to be shocked when they disappear tomorrow morning and don't judge me too harshly okkk?? xxx

i hope you enjoy besties x smooches

wc: 2k words

warnings: aged-up!neteyam, female human!reader, jealousy trope, smut (fingering, edging), strong language, cursing, kinda mean!neteyam, praise kink, small degradation kink, i guess that's all light day for me

na'vi compendium: tewng - loincloth, tiyawn - love

As a human living on Pandora, your life was never boring. Anything that the Na’vi would ever find mundane or ordinary, anything that humans on Earth might think is just another thing in a vast array of distractions always present in their day to day lives, to you, it was all new. Everything was just another opportunity to learn and grow, to experience life in a way that you weren’t quite made for, but that was full of lessons, surprises, full of excitement and adventure, full of… entertainment. 

That's all it was. A... lesson. It was important for you to understand where you came from, or more accurately, where your parents came from, and that included looking at videos of what they considered art. And boy, was it art, alright!

A video that you've now memorised by heart was playing in one of the recreation rooms, because seeing it on a small screen just wasn't quite enough. The beautiful music video featured incredible vistas of Earth like you've never quite seen it before, a choreography that highlighted just how fluid and dynamic humans could actually be when trying, a symphony of voices blending together beautifully, lyrics that melted your heart, and the most beautiful human men you have ever laid your eyes on, and you were almost upset that that what was what was missing from Pandora, and instead was all you got was old scientists who even at the best of times were not quite the same... sight.

It pained Neteyam to admit that when you asked him to come and hang around the labs, something he didn't like doing in the best of circumstances (but always did because of you), he definitely didn't expect this. He didn't quite understand the feelings plaguing him, feelings that never tried him before, as he watched your face, completely entranced and mesmerised, looking at the big screen where human men were singing and dancing in a way he found silly, but to his massive shock - you didn't. You and Neteyam shared an opinion on most things, have done since you were but children, growing up together in this world that scared you both, but that you braved together. So why was it now that this was changed this little fact that he was so fond of, that he held on for dear life, that he cherished with everything he had?

Is this what he was feeling? Sadness? No... it didn't quite feel like sadness. The twitching in his eye and the way his hands balled up in a tight fist is not what he associated with feeling down. Anger? Neteyam didn't get angry too often, but the times he did, it felt hot, like burning embers pushed down his throat. So not quite anger, either. It felt... bitter, like a poisoned fruit. His stomach tightened at the way you were almost drooling over these men that you didn't know, that were just like you, and nothing like Neteyam. Is this what you wanted? Is that who you craved? A human, someone whose hands fit in yours perfectly and whose body was made to hold your own without towering over you?

Neteyam felt the ugly feeling surge through his veins until it was like iced-water replaced all his blood, and he suddenly recognised the feeling from a distant memory of the past, one he shared with his dad.

"Jealousy, son, is like... a wave, that comes and goes, and can ripple over your feet or can drown you in sorrow, and anger and pain. It's watching someone get something you want, it's feeling a precious thing slip through your fingers, no matter how hard you try to hold on to it. It's cold and powerful, it's the ugliest of emotions, and it's inevitable. Just don't let it consume you."

"Hey! I was watching that!" You screamed in Neteyam's direction in an attempt to understand what just happened, why he took the remote away from you and turned off the projector, leaving you a confused and dazed mess. Your already struggling mind got even more scrambled, as your friend placed a large hand on your chest, pushing you to the ground and getting on top of you, hovering until your faces were so close, they were almost touching, until his breath was warm and musky and deepening the quiet, steady haze overtaking you. Your eyes widened taking him in, flared nose and deep frown marring his beautiful face, but nothing held a candle to his own eyes, yellow orbs of molten gold, so precious and unique to you, so, so beautiful and right now, almost swallowed by his black irises that were more dilated that you've ever seen them before.

"Neteyam... what are you doing?"

"Why am I here, huh? Why did you ask me to come, so I can watch you drool over human men? So I can see how much you want them?"

"What are you talk-"

His words confounded you, almost as much as his tone did. He sounded... jealous. He couldn't be. Right? You and Neteyam were just friends... just friends. Sure, you've shared a few drunken kissess and flirty comments throughout your life, and you've found yourself catching him looking at you in a way that indicated something... more, but he was Neteyam. Neteyam, the prince of the Omaticaya. Neteyam, the future Olo'eyktan. Neteyam, the most intelligent, caring, kind, compassionate, beautiful, sexy man you've ever seen... and a Na'vi. He had a line of women at his beck and call, so in time, you've come to terms with the fact he would never look at you, merely a measly human, and why should he? There was so much separating you, so much you'd never be able to overcome. And yet still, here he was, eyeing you like he hungered for you, like he ached for you, and your core throbbed at the view, a soft moan barely contained as you felt his twitching cock brush against your thigh.

"Is this what you want, what you crave, friend? All this fucking time, I thought there was a chance you might want me, the way I want you, the way I need you. And turns out I never stood a fucking chance, huh?"

"Neteyam, no, I -"

"What, what do you have to say for yourself?"

His hand was tracing your body softly, inching from your neck and collarbone, down your chest and waist, ghosting over your hips, until he found your shorts, clinging to your body in a way that drove him crazy, that let little to the imagination, that made him wants to explore every inch of you with his fingers, and his tongue.

"Is this for them?" when his hand slipped in between your thighs, feeling the wet patch that formed there in the short time he was on top of you, you pushed them instinctively together, trapping his fingers as they started to move, the moan unable to remain trapped inside of you anymore. The shake of your head was so aggressive it gave you whiplash, but you wanted him to know, needed him to know that it was him, only him, always him.

"No, Netey-, fuck! No, it's for you!"

The growl that escaped him made your heart still in your chest, the raw, powerful emotion something you have never seen in Neteyam, who was always a calming, tame presence in your life. It took him no time at all to remove the shorts that he's dreamt of seeing around your ankles for so long, a reality that he would cherish later, once his mind was no longer poisoned by the bitter hold of jealousy.

"You're lying. I saw the way you're watching them, I saw the look in your eyes. You just want a little human man your own size, huh?"

He takes a second, just a second to admire your body, that he's seen in all his filthiest, most beautiful dreams as it welcomed him, spread for him, bent for him, arched for him, but nothing, not even the absolute best of them, compared to the sight that would be forever tattooed in his brain from this point on. Your disheveled face, parted lips and blushing cheeks, messy hair as you were sprawled on the floor, looking at him with blown up pupils through your long lashes, your chest heaving up and down, nipples poking through your tank top... it all drove him fucking crazy. He wanted nothing more than to fuck you, long and hard, and show you that you deserved better than a human, that he can make you come in ways you haven't even imagined before.

"I'm not lying, Neteyam. I never thought you'd ever want me, so I moved on. But I need you, I want you, please. Only you. Only you, please."

His cock twitched and hardened even more at your words, more than he ever thought was fucking possible, and it hurt, the strain caused by his tightened tewng, the desire to fill you up more overwhelming by the second.

"Is that so, baby girl? You want me to fuck you?" his hand pushes your lace panties to the side, smirking at how drenched they were, and his breath hitches in his throat at the way your swollen folds glistened with slick, at the way your smell inundated his senses and pushed him to a primal state, in which nothing else in this world existed but you, and the desire to fill you up with him cum and watch as it dripped out of your small, perfect cunt.

"Yes! Yes, please!"

"Have you been good enough to deserve to be fucked, pretty girl? Is this what you think good girls do? Acting like a little slut, salivating over men that could never satisfy you?"

You whimper as his pushes two fingers in you, curling them so they drag against the spongy part in your core in a way that makes you squirm under him. The stretch is just enough to feel pressure building in you, not enough to reach the height in needed to be released, and you start grinding, fucking yourself on his fingers, hoping to get yourself there, hoping to reach the orgasm you needed more desperately with every passing second. Your actions anger him, as he pulls his fingers out swiftly and straddles you once more, a dangerous glimmer in his eyes that felt like no light could escape from.

"Answer me."

"I-I'm sorry. It won't happen again."

"That's right, baby girl. And why is that?"

"Because I'm yours. I'm all yours."

"Fuck, that's right, baby. You're mine. All fucking mine."

"Open your mouth for me." You do as you're told, and watch as he brings his fingers to your lips and pushes past them, until your mouth is coated in your slick, and you close your lips around them, swirling your tongue on and in between them, until you gather every last drop. He groans a wild, erotic groan, feeling the way your clean yourself off of him dutifully, and he lets his mind fantasise about the day you'll be chocking on his cock, your beautiful eyes drowned in tears as the girth becomes too much to handle, drops falling down your face as you try to take more of him, your tongue flat against him as he thrusts in and out of your mouth, as he comes down your throat. He slowly removes his fingers, even as you cling on, and they come out with a pop, and you smile at the sound, teeth finding your bottom lip as they sink into it, trying to suppress the smirk threatening to form on your lips.

"Such a filthy girl. Gonna make you feel so good, baby. Gonna show you why I'm the only one for you."

"You took my fingers so well, tiyawn. Now let's see how well you take my cock."

taglist: @fanboyluvr @theycallmesia @yagirlheree

[traumxrei-archive]

【 at the end of a day. 】

'i hope my own shoulders, and thick hands will become your comfort at the end of a tiring day. you did a good job, you worked so hard.' (ft. leona kingscholar)

gn! reader, word count: 1.7k, warning! mention of burnout and academic stress

a/n: i've been highkey stressed bc of deadlines, so i wrote this. this being self indulgent hurt/comfort with leona kingscholar. hope that everyone's taking care of themself this exam season ^^

To be honest, Leona was annoyed. But that was his selfishness talking, he wasn't annoyed at Yuu, he was more annoyed at all the deadlines taking up their time. He hasn't seen them in days now.

And to be even more honest, he was...worried. He stared at his phone, at how his texts and calls had been going unanswered for hours now. It was normal for them not to text everyday, but they had also told him that they get too engrossed in studying at times. Leona hazarded that this was one of those times.

That was why Leona was here, staring up at their self-imposed prison called Ramshackle, a bag of food in his hand. He was sure Yuu was in there, watching the flicker of their curtain from their open window. He trudged through the empty halls, climbing up the familiar staircase till he reached the front of their room.

He could feel the prickle of the ghosts' stares on him, and he turned into the empty air, "How long has the herbivore been at it?"

A ghost materialized near him, "It's been...hours since they've stopped to rest."

"And Grim?"

"Grim stormed out after they refused to stop and take a break," Another ghost said, looking sadly at the room.

"Alright," He sighed, hand on their doorknob. "Tell Grim to enter the room quietly when he's back. Don't worry, I'll get them to rest."

After the briefest of moments, he opened the door.

Light filtered through the open window, and he saw Yuu hunched over their desk. He saw a stack of textbooks next to them, accompanied by the faint glow of their computer screen. There were papers strewn all over the table and floor, and he even spotted what looked like dried alchemy ingredients in vials in the corner.

Leona wasted no time sitting on their bed. The creak most definitely drew their attention because they finally spoke, hand still scribbling on their notebook, "Grim? Hey, I'm sorry about earlier, I–"

"Try again."

And that was when Yuu finally froze. They turned slowly, a disbelieving look on their face as they saw him, "Leona. Did Grim ask you to come? You didn't tell me you were coming, I–"

"Was studying, I know," Leona watched as they scrambled to find something. "I called you a couple of times earlier, and you didn't reply."

They finally found it: their phone, buried under a stack of papers, "I'm...so sorry, my phone's out of battery."

"That's rare," Leona said, taking the phone from their hands and plugging it in. "How long has it been since you took a break?" He didn't really need to ask. He could see the fatigue smudged under their eyes, and in their unfocused gaze. It had been long enough since they took a break. But he wanted to hear it directly from them.

Yuu shrugged, "A couple of hours?" He sighed, approaching them.

"What time is it?" Leona towered over their seat, his arms boxing them in. "And don't even try cheating, herbivore." This close, he could see the messiness of their desk, the empty waterbottles discarded on the side, and the multitude of tabs open on their laptop. He could also see the sleepy droop of their eyes, their fingers reddened and raw from where the pencil had indented itself there for who knows how long.

They finally met his eyes, offering a tentative, "It's...uhm, 11am...?"

Leona's hands tightened its grip on their chair, "Herbivore, it's 2pm." He watched as the realization followed by panic play out on their face before he tugged them up.

"Sit on the bed. If I see you touching your computer or phone, you're dead meat," Leona ran a hand through his hair out of frustration more than anything. "And eat this. I'll go get you some water."

Once he saw them opening the bag, Leona made his way to their kitchen. He grabbed a tall glass of water, placing the empty water bottles in the sink before leaving.

When he made his way back up, they were sitting on the bed with a notebook open. Yuu raised their hands in surrender when they saw him, "You said no phone or computer. Nothing about notebooks."

Leona's jaw ticked, "Put that away and eat." They followed his order wordlessly, throwing the notebook onto the floor. Meanwhile he busied himself with their computer saving whatever was open, before closing it.

They had already scarfed down most of the rice bowl when they finally spoke again, "Are you mad at me?"

"More like frustrated at how bad you are at taking care of yourself when you study," Leona mumbled, pushing the water into their hands. They gulped it down all in one go and he sighed. "When's your next deadline?"

Yuu glanced at the clock, "4pm tomorrow."

"And how much is done?"

"Most of it, but–"

"That means you're sleeping. Now."

"Leona. I can't just...I can't sleep," There was this defeated look on Yuu's face and Leona wanted nothing more than to will it away.

"Elaborate for me," He sat across from them now, as they pushed around their rice. "Why can't you sleep?" Instead of answering, they let the silence grow, placing their food to the side table.

"It's...stupid."

"It's not stupid if you're still thinking about it," He frowned more openly now. He couldn't pretend to understand what they were going through. No matter how much knowledge he had, it would never give him the ability to read another's mind. All he could do was wait for them to open up.

"I just... Sleeping seems like a waste of time when I've got this much work," The words rushed out into the quiet of the room, and they gulped, as if they had been waiting to say them for so long. They almost choked on the words, their voice rising higher as they spoke, "It's stupid, because... well obviously you need sleep to be able to work. But I feel...guilty. There's so much to do and not enough time and I've been working deadline-to-deadline and...

Yuu head hung forward, "I'm so tired." The sentence was said in a whisper, almost like it was a plead for help.

"Herbivore..." Leona's heart ached for them. It wasn't only because of their struggles. No, it was because he was familiar with the feeling. Of wanting to do so much, and yet his body couldn't take it. Of struggling in vain in front of walls too tall for him to ever reach. Of the tiredness clawing at his limbs, until he had given up and surrendered to days of listless sleep.

"Let's sleep," Yuu nodded shortly; a clear attempt at deflecting. "I haven't slept since yesterday morning, I should—"

Leona caught their arm, meeting their eyes, "Hey. I can't say that I know what you're going through. But...I've been somewhere similar. And you're not alone. I see all the effort you're putting in; all that hard work. And I..."

Leona let out a soft sigh, his hand reaching to hold theirs, "I'm proud of you, okay?"

And he meant it. He meant every last word, because there was no one that could make him prouder than Yuu could. He just...hoped that they would believe him; believe in their own hard work and effort.

"Are you...trying to make me cry?" Their eyes burned with unshed tears as they glared at him, and Leona met their stare with a pang in his heart. It wasn't his intention to make them cry, of all things. He really was unskilled with words at times.

"No. I'm trying to get you to realize that you don't need to prove yourself to anyone," Leona wiped at their tears, and they leaned into his palm readily. "Not even to me, okay? Academics are important, but your health is more important."

"Then...could you..." They hesitated again and he squeezed their hand. "Could you stay here with me? Just until my assignments are done. You don't have to help or anything, you can just...sit there. Or nap."

"If that means you sleep and eat on time, then yes. Gladly," Leona strangely felt warm at the thought of them seeking comfort in him, warmer still at the way their hand held his. "You can always call me when you need me. You should go to sleep now."

The herbivore flopped back onto the bed, shuffling so they were lying next to him. Leona covered them with the blanket, an arm under his head.

"Thank you," Their voice was soft, a little wobbly. "For coming, and the food, and...everything."

"Of course," Leona said, voice equally as soft. "I can't just stand by and watch you wear yourself out."

"Thanks to my supportive and caring boyfriend, I can finally rest without feeling guilty," Their eyes finally fluttered shut, and Leona felt his heart squeeze. He leaned toward them, pressing a kiss to the crown of their head. That drew a small smile from them before they were burying their head into their pillow.

Leona waited until he was absolutely sure they were asleep before finally sighing. He was still concerned about if they really were okay. What would've happened if he didn't come sooner? Would he have recieved a summons from Grim? Or worse...the infirmary?

Leona didn't want to think about that. But at least now he could make sure that they would be just fine. He wrapped his arms more securely around them, closing his eyes. For now, all he needed to do was sleep, and when he awakened, he could take care of them.

If what Yuu needed was his presence he would gladly give them his time. If they needed his counsel, he would listen and advice. And if in the end of the day, all they needed was someone to hold them, and tell them they did well...he would do it.

Leona would give them all the comfort that they deserved for that was what Yuu was to him. And he hoped that they would one day regard him to be the same. A warm place to come home to. A place only they knew, and only they could have. Right there, in each others' arms.

(as an easter egg, the title of this fic + the excerpt are lyrics from the song "end of a day" by jonghyun <3 it's a song that comforts me when i'm having a hard day, so i thought i'd share it)

and that's a wrap on the fic ! i hope you enjoyed and that it was able to bring you some comfort <33 if you wanna see more, come check out my masterlist ^^

[edmufics]

S5 Theory Part Three

SO

Here are my theories with all the info I have from The Dark Tower universe.

Disclaimer: Im not saying any of these are right, likely to happen, or that I necessarily even want them to happen. I just think that btwn learning ab TDT and rewatching stranger things, these are fun theories to consider!

*SPOILERS FOR SEASON 1-4 AHEAD*

*MENTIONS OF S5 BTS CONTENT AHEAD* I think S5 will come out on July 15th, 2025—the ninth anniversary! It will take place over the course of several months rather than a week or two like we have seen in the past. I think it will start in late summer, back-to-school time. I think we will see a lot more of Mr. Clark this season, and he will fill some of the scientist roles (along with new casting) we will be missing after S4's deaths. We will see a lot more flashbacks this season, either due to trying to keep Vecna out with positive memories or just reminiscing. Vecna will return to Hawkins lab at some point. Possibly a significant battle or it will be his lair. Vecna takes Holly, but I'm not sure he kills her (Like an 80% chance he does tho) I think with the increased army presence, we may see the kids lose the ability to see or visit Max (since she is a Venca victim). Nancy has a candy stripper/nurse outfit this season because they are trying to sneak in to see/save her in some way. I'm at about 60% on the chance of Kalli coming back. If she does, it will either help El train or help El defeat Vecna. Nancy detective journalist era, but she isn't going to leave for college. She would never just dip like that. Stobin or Nancy work at the radio station set we've seen. Hopper will either be stuck in hiding with El or in the army, but only as a means of gathering intel.

I think that people were not far off on the Kas theory. I think there will be a character that represents Kas, but it'll be Will. In S4 they talk about how Vecna doesn't kill his victims, he absorbs their abilities/souls. We also see that El can revive the dead (Max) in some way. That skill isn't practiced on her part, and we know Vecna is stronger than she is. I think Vecna kills Will and then revives him using memories like El did to Max, but only uses his darkest memories. These memories turn him against his friends, at which point he becomes Kas. Mike will be the key to getting Will back (since Mike is the heart). Mike will have to confront his romantic or platonic feelings for Will while reminding him of their good memories. This will lead to Will delivering the final blow to Vecna (like Kas) when he remembers.

I also think the idea of "Twinners" from The Talisman will come into play, but not quite in the same way. Instead of them all having Upside Down twins, I think Vecna will reanimate the corpses of his victims (since we've seen that the bodies are still in the Upside Down) and use these reanimated corpses to torture the MCs. Especially bc we know that it's all a hive mind so anyone killed by a part of Vecna's hive mind was technically killed by Vecna (depending on if thats how they wanna spin it). Specifically, I think Dustin will be either Vecna'd (but not killed) or have to see Eddie's reanimated corpse (fitting in with strange similarities between Eddie and Metallica's Eddie). Barb will return to torture Nancy, Bob returning for Joyce, etc.

In the Talisman universe, there is a plot where the person who opens the gate banishes himself to an alternate universe and closes the gate forever, forcing himself to leave behind everyone he loves. I think this is how El's story will end. She won't die but instead will have to stay in the Upside Down forever. In the end, we will see a crying Mike looking up and noticing the light above him glowing brightly, showing how he and El may continue communicating.

Characters I think could die:

Vicki (they loooove giving us a new character to fall in love with so they can brutally kill them that same season)

Steve (sacrificing himself for the Dustin, Robin, or Johnathan.) Holly (Maybe, it just seems too easy) Dr. Owens Vecna (Duh) Either Lucas or Max (I think Max may come back only to lose Lucas) Murray Ted Wheeler Wayne Munson (following Eddie's reanimated corpse into the upside down; I think that's how they reveal that Vecna reanimated the bodies)

Characters that I think are 100% going to survive: Mike Dustin (will try to be a hero like Eddie, but Steve will sacrifice himself to save Dustin (I think at the church)) Will Joyce Karen Wheeler

Anyone else, I'm not sure they are safe, but I also don't think they are going to die.

Thanks for coming to my TED talk!

[hetaliastuf]

Hetalia Characters Playing Minecraft

Italy

- plays on peaceful. he's TERRIFIED of hostile mobs

- his fav biome is the flower forest. he always tries to build there bc he thinks it looks pretty

- has a fully organised 10x10 storage room, with item frames for every chest and everything. not automatic tho

- he has a pet cat named Carbonara

Germany

- probably built a tiny hut in the mountains. it's a pain to get up and down and he kinda regrets it now

- has a pet dog. he actually takes it on walks sometimes

- "why would i fight the dragon?"

- he actually likes wandering traders

- likes making redstone stuff. most of his farms are automatic

Japan

- he has like 20 bases that he travels between through the nether

- builds nicer houses for the villagers

- he just likes building in general

- always has the worst luck finding diamonds. he could mine through 7 iron pickaxes at y -58 and still not find any

- trying to get every achievement in the game (he can actually do it)

America

- pure chaos

- doesn't even have a base, he just moves from place to place and sets things on fire

- tried to get a pet creeper, which ended very badly. anyway, he's now trying to befriend a guardian

- "enchantments?? pfft, who needs those?"

- thinks the warden is easy to kill, also died to it like 15 times

- he names every mob he sees. his current favourite is a cow he calls Jim and he accidentally transported to the nether

- leaves trees mid-air

- trying to get every achievement in the game (he absolutely won't do it)

Canada

- probably gets the worst seeds ever

- he built a village for his base but he doesn't want to kidnap villagers and bring them there, so it's kinda empty

- his most common death is probably something like getting suffocated by gravel

- he really likes endermen but he doesn't wanna go to the end bc he'd feel bad to bother them at their home dimension

- really enjoys fishing

England

- doesn't build farms, he just steals crops from villages

- went to the nether once and got killed by a piglin. he refuses to ever go there again now

- actually likes the illagers

- loves enchanting. he probably has a book for every enchantment in the game

- tries VERY hard to be a good builder, fails miserably

- has a pink pet sheep he named Mr Wilson

France

- definitely prefers pretty farms over efficient farms

- wants to take over a woodland mansion

- may or may not switch to peaceful when he has half a heart left

- absolutely loves armour trims

- digs straight down, dies, gets confused, repeat

- he thinks the warden is hot

China

- built a huge base, he constantly expands on it actually

- probably made golden tools / armour at least once

- he doesn't understand how to spawn the wither, but still somehow makes better redstone contraptions than Germany

- has a pet panda that he built an entire bamboo mansion for

- tries to get max trades with every villager, insists none of them are useless

- regularly dies to desert / jungle temple traps

Russia

- loves the snow biomes, he always builds there and says they feel like home

- kills iron golems for early game iron

- probably built a really tall evil looking tower and decorated it with flower pots and pink wood inside

- he didn't kill the ender dragon and actually bridged through 1k blocks of air to get to the other end islands

- he hates acacia wood with a burning passion

[seokmattchuus]

Na Kamden as a dom

Prefacing this by saying I am very delusional.

This is in no way accurate by any means bc all I've seen from other content is the opposite of this.

I wrote this for the sake of my sanity.

But moving on.

Somewhere in the middle of hard dom and soft dom but if you push enough, you get a brat tamer.

No, I will not elaborate because I don't even know what that means.

It just makes sense, y'know?

Like,

He's nice until he's not?

But when he's not nice anymore, he will fuck you up?

Definitely might take him some time to get there, but you can't tell me he wouldn't make the best brat tamer.

Like,

On the regular, he's not too strict but he's also not the most lenient.

Mostly because he uses his height to his advantage.

He doesn't need to you the voice because all he has to do is take a little step towards you and look down at you and boom, a natural brat-be-gone.

Can't blame you, though.

If he stepped towards me after being a brat, my five-foot-one-and-a-half ass (the half counts, okay) would cower like the chihuahua that I am (got that dog in me, y'know).

Like.

My hypothetical timbers shiver at the thought (in a good way).

But brat tamer Kamden?

:3

He likes to use pet play as a funishment.

Because he's still trying to give you a chance to make it up to him.

And he's also not trying to ruin you completely.

Just a little bit.

The degradation of having the full kitty get up is enough to humble you so you're not pushing it.

Ears, collar, tail, no clothes.

Because kitties don't wear clothes.

He uses the leash to keep you in place.

Or keep you from looking away.

He'll pull you up to be right in front of his face and hold you there.

He's a lover of forced eye contact so he can watch you struggle not to close your eyes.

Which leads to my next point:

If he is trying to ruin you completely, the tail might be a plug.

That vibrates.

Ororor

Maybe cuffs you to a cage and refuses to touch you.

Maybe uses a fuck machine instead. Because you obviously aren't going to listen. Why would he even try?

And he'll be mean about it.

"Awe, does someone want me to let them out?"

"If I let you out, don't think I'm going to make you cum."

"You get the machine, or nothing at all."

Or you're only allowed out if you're going to get yourself off.

Bc he's not about to reward you.

"You didn't want to listen, so you obviously don't need me."

"Show me how much you need it, and I might touch you."

I will not expand on this for my own sanity because I'm not trying to give myself thots. It's almost 4am.

Moving back to regular dom Kamden.

He loves reminding you how small you are compared to him.

All the time.

Holding hands and talking about how small yours are in his.

When you're sitting on his lap and he just towers over you.

Or his hands on your thighs.

Or when he has both your wrists in one hand.

Or when he's holding your wrist and his hand is just. So big.

He loves to verbally remind you, too.

Usually cooing at you.

Gives caregiver vibe lowkey, but he also just seems like the type to baby you anyways.

"My little baby."

"Look at how cute you are." (usually while pinching your cheek)

When he's feeling generous and wants to see you correct your own behavior, he likes keeping track of how much you're misbehaving.

I'm talking using a clicker all day.

And the final number could be anything, really.

How many times he's going to deny/keep you cumming.

How many spanks you'll get.

How many minutes he'll go without touching you (he might multiply it by two just for funsies)

Or how long he'll go on teasing you.

If he's feeling not-so-generous.

He's using the three-strike method and announcing them very loudly.

Does not care if you're around others.

Nope.

Counting down from three while walking towards you.

Or giving you silent signals to check you.

Bc he knows you're looking at him after messing up.

But he loves the attention.

And loves that you're doing it for his attention.

Wouldn't have it any other way, truly.

He also likes to threaten you with what he's going to do to you once you're both alone.

Just to rile you up some more.

But his aftercare game?

Unmatched.

He's gonna let you both nap before he washes you up.

Let's you relax in the bath after cleaning you so he can work on some food or snacks. Whichever you're in the mood for.

But you do get a big glass of ice cold water.

With a bendy straw :)

He gives you his softest hoodie to wrap yourself in while you both cuddle and watch tv.

Wraps his big ol' arms around you and holds you close while feeding you and maybe the occasional forehead kiss.

And asking if you're okay.

"Are you sure you're okay?"

"Nothing hurts, right?"

"My baby eats so well."

"Let me know if you need anything."

He's completely different from before. Total 180.

Big ol' softie.

[ideasarestuckinmyhead]

Seeing as how you don’t mind doing research I would like to request hc’s for Alphonse, Auron, Seth, and Lucien playing splatoon 3 with the listener (if you need more specifics like if they’re playing single player or multi player, dlc or base game or anyother details that could help you pls let me know!) :D

Splatoon!

Hope I did good! I really did like the lore I read it was interesting and makes me wanna play splatoon! I think I based this more on the base game?

Auron

I think he's really curious about the lore of the game (I read it, it was really interesting how the squid and octarian's evolution went) So he enjoy's the story mode. Will ask questions about some of the lore so he knows everything.

Since you can't play multiplayer for story mode he'd probably buy a nintendo to play with you. The game play looks really interesting and the characters too are very well written.

When he first played turf war he understood it quickly and mostly focused on covering the map with the color of your team. But if someone did try and fight him he learned how to defeat them quickly.

I can see him liking playing splatoon with you but only sometimes bc he is busy and isn't fully interesting in games. However if you do ask him to play he won't say no.

Seth

Really confused on what to do when playing because he doesn't really play a lot of games. But tries to learn how to play with you, but I feel like Seth would prefer slow pace Nintendo games like how he likes Animal crossing.

Probably would prefer to watch you play story mode, I feel like he'd prefer to watch you game then actually play the game. Since he doesn't know wtf he's doing he prefers to watch someone who does.

If you do ever get him a switch and the game he'll play it till he gets to a good point to play multiplayer with you. I can see him liking tower mode, where you try and move a tower into the enemy territory the farthest.

I feel like after a while when he gets the hang of the game he'd play it himself. Kinda like how he took over Al's island. Is also willing if he has time to play any of the game modes you want to play.

Lucien

No fucking clue wtf is going on but he loves it here. The character's look silly and he likes how he can customize his avatar. It looks so chaotic bc he can't decide wtf he wants it to look like.

Doesn't really care for the story mode, but will listen to you explain the lore to him. Will he remember it? Probably not but its the thought of him trying to understand that makes it nice.

Some how summons a Nintendo? Don't ask question he can play w you now! Since he's learning all the modes and other things he doesn't really have a favorite mode. As long as you guys win he doesn't really care.

Lowkey got addicted to the game bc he was playing so many modes and stuff. Some how go to a very high level in the span of a week? Someone get that switch OUT of his hand.

Alphonse

Look at these colorful guys! What even are they? Asks a lot of questions bc he want's to understand the best he could.

Lazer focused in when playing the story mode bc he want's you to see how he is trying. Yes, Al did get some of the lore confused but he likes playing and talking about the game with you!

He's kinda chaotic to play with in game modes bc he's competitive. I feel like he plays aggressive in turf war fighting people and adding more to the ink coverage for the team.

He's really happy you introduced him to the game bc it's really fun! Also for giggles I would think he's good at clam blitz bc he's collecting so many fucking clams. Al cackles as he destroys the other team's clam basket.

[maybevillage]

my really really long rant about endwalker

i'm not kidding this is really long. spoilers ahead of course, like immediately upon entry. sorry i sound so angry the whole time

unfortunately for me and for anyone reading this, endwalker is one of those cases where i like/d so much of what happens that the many weak moments make me more critical of the whole than i would be if it was just wholly bad like stormblood, bc it's a waste of potential. a lot of the time the moments i liked would even be happening simultaneously with the things i find so problematic: cheap storytelling decisions, cheap moments that only serve as fanservice or for shock value that only detract from a characters’ pre-existing complexity, poorly done rehashing of elements from shadowbringers, a lot of hollow pseudo-intellectual arguments, rushed and underdeveloped writing in one instance and then meandering wastes of time immediately after….these issues are so consistent that rather than try to break up endwalker's story based on these things, i will just try to run thru the whole thing chronologically and hope i don't get too repetitive. that's why this isn't an essay with some pretense of structure. i'll do my best.

what's crazy to me is i thought endwalker was going to be my second favourite expansion. this was despite not caring about its original main conflict--i thought fandaniel just wasn't a compelling or even interesting villain. he comes out of nowhere. and he's also asahi so that association is hard to break away from bc i find asahi silly. and he suffers from the same writing issues zenos does, where nearly every cutscene with them did little to develop their characters further from the baseline, only reiterated what i already know bc they literally never say anything else: zenos wants to fight wol, he's bored with everything life could possibly offer, fandaniel will ensure zenos can fight wol through his towers bc he no longer plays to the tune of his unsundered masters... even though what fandaniel was promising to cause were the final days i just didn't really care. in the wake of shadowbringers the final days are like a pretty big deal, but something about reviving a catastrophe i had just finished wrapping up--i thought, naively--made bringing them back seem really thoughtless. i don't really need to see anymore final days...like how much more do i need to understand how bad it was? i mean i think shb did a pretty good job????? of making the final days seem pretty fucking bad. why not come up with something new because this is endwalker and not shadowbringers haha? the only fresh thing about this new uncooler final days was the motivation behind them. fandaniel wanting to bring about the final days bc he wants to die and thinks everything should die with him vs emet-selch's unwillingness to die no matter what bc the final days took everything from him and he needs to bring it all back. still, recontextualising the final days from a past event into a present issue ruins them to me. whatever, i thought, there's no way we're letting the final days happen so what does this matter anyways. there's no way.

so yeah post-shb into ew was starting to lose me plot-wise. not the end of the world (LOL?) though bc the atmosphere in the beginning was so subtle and fresh and rich like dew in the morning that i was willing to look past it. going to old sharlayan i liked a lot. i liked going there not as a more typical homecoming for your friends but to instead uncover the sharlayan forum's cryptic behaviour. this kind of intrigue was what i really wanted after the grandness of shadowbringers and i really do think endwalker gave me that for a while. i liked the opening scene on the ship a lot bc it felt exciting and uncertain and new, especially talking to hydaelyn. i liked how she had become such an unstable variable after originally being the most anchoring presence in the entire game: learning she's a primal, whether she's actually “good” after listening to emet-selch’s explanation of her origins and actions in shb, and the fact that her appeals to her champions have been fewer and fewer… i thought her meeting with you at the very beginning of endwalker was cool and foreboding. i also really liked the emet-selch narration btw, i thought that was a fun choice. who better to guide you into the final stages of your adventure than the person who left you with that final, most important task. i wish this had been the only callback to his character at all. 

so a big part of why i like/d endwalker so much is all that atmosphere. and something i can't really put into words. it just felt cool and cohesive at the start. old sharlayan is one of my favourite locations now; i like that despite its rigidity and (to me farcical but w/e tangent) pursuit of rationality/knowledge, there's the quaint island charm and fresh winter sea and overgrown greenery and forest paths. i liked that the game enhanced the usual hubworld tour chore by having g’raha and krile follow you around to give you more personal anecdotes of the place, really gave it a more lived-in feeling, which really added to both them and the location. i also really liked all this charm and familiarity in tandem with the secret hostility of the place bc of the forum, having to sneak around and so on, sharlayan citizens not really recognising you somehow? but being very aware of a warrior of light threat to their way of life, even if i find that non-intervention way of life silly.

i also really liked labryinthos. it's a really creative place. i liked its uncanny false sky and controlled environment, and yet all the people scrambling about inside. and the music felt kind of magical like i had encountered another fairy area or something idk it all felt very whimsical. thavnair i really liked as well but i feel like my immediate impression of the place was kind of poisoned by the stereotypes, like the huge focus on trade and the first impression being undercutting foreign tourists but then i started to really enjoy the part where you run around with matsya and help him sell fish. i liked the mundanity and slow pace of that exercise bc it felt like a much more involved way of learning about thavnair and its current issues through conversations rather than the fetch quest slog, and this is one of the things i like a lot about the beginning of endwalker. the gameplay really improved i think bc they found more creative ways of having you interact with your surroundings, rather than having the usual running between npcs to fetch things for them or other chores. like rather than doing a string of quests and then being rewarded with development of the story, the gameplay simultaneously develops the story. like turning into frogs i thought was fun, testing nidhana’s aether lamp was fun, etc. it felt like they had better ideas about how to progress the in-between parts.

thavnair quickly started to upset me though bc it started to feel like the only relevance the location had was what they could give you for your military cause, that is, the scales. like alchemy is this place’s big highlight and its just the scales the scales the scales and the tower aughhhhhh!!!!!!! the tower!!!!!!!!!! i wish they had focused on something but i guess this is just to be expected with ffxiv...any interaction with a foreign ("foreign" as far as square enix eorzea is concerned) culture really boils down to how they might bolster your military efforts, the azim steppe for eg. so it felt like my concern for an individual (matsya) and the experience firsthand trying to help him with his day to day; the idea that every single person on earth is important and shouldn't be made to suffer, and helping that single person... was like overshadowed by something more focused on a “greater good", that is, the construction of the scales to defeat the towers to save the world ad infinitum. but if you played endwalker then you would know how this idea of only concerning oneself with a "greater good" and this diluting of the importance of an individual's life for the sake of this idealistic whole causes some problems for a certain someone..................so why didn't the game focus more on these themes? probably because at the end of the day it's a video game by square enix and you need a big boss to fight or something or bc this expansion is insanely unfocused i don't know. i feel like this concept about the importance of the small things that can add up to one life and how that one life is beautiful and important crops up with the significance of weeds despite its importance overall. i don't know if i think this is one of the main underlying themes of endwalker just poorly executed so as to not even be there or if i just wish it was one of its main themes. anyways i'm getting distracted, what i mean to say is thavnair gets dehumanised throughout the entire expansion in the most horrific ways possible so i guess this was just the start

moving on... i liked the part in garlemald a lot, which i didn't expect bc i don't expect this game to handle anything regarding imperialism well. i liked that the garlemald you finally experience, after it being one of your main enemies and this very proud nation, was just this dead quiet and ruined place. the quest where you follow that girl is another eg of how the gameplay was a bit more immersive, i think it helped me feel the loneliness and the danger of the place, that i could be a danger to this girl. that i really had to try if i wanted to help her. what i didn't like was alphinaud's and alisaie’s babying attitude towards the garleans? like ok yeah of course we’re gonna have patience and grace for GARLEMALD meanwhile lyse was losing her head at the ala mhigans whenever they disagreed with her. like sure arguing won't get anywhere but it felt like the twins were reckoning with children sometimes, it was so strange. but i did like that the game didn't shy away from making the garleans just unpleasant to be around at best, and an actual danger to you at worst. it's just better to me to make them harder to reconcile with so that there's no frustrating cheap shots at redemption but rather a good, sobering look at a society that's been totally and willingly misled. and i liked that alisaie's and alphinaud's attempts to help those garlean kids ended so badly, even though i'm not usually a fan of such cruel outcomes. it felt like we were seeing a garlemald not necessarily being punished for its actions more than we were seeing a place built on shitty ideals crumble bc of those ideals. i thought jullus was a good char and helped to carry that idea of disillusionment forward. i didn't care so much about sympathising with what he'd lost, but i did find it interesting how they contrast him with the legatus he's working under, who even while the place is in ruins is still more concerned with war than providing for the people relying on him. i don't think the part in garlemald is perfect by any means, like it doesn't do anything too brave, but ig it was a lot more subtle and complex in its storytelling than i expected. and it wasn't meaninglessly cruel. like i'm glad those shock collars put on the twins were only used to gauge jullus' emotional growth or something like him not wanting to activate them rather than them actually being fucking used which would have just made me close the game and not look back.

from here on is where i struggle to lock in for the rest of the story. starting with when zenos kidnaps you in the midst of the fighting at camp broken glass--i don't think i have ever been more immediately mentally locked out of a story. endwalker is darker than usual, trapping people in fleshy towers, two young girls lying dead on the ice, tentacles erupting out of tempered garlean soldiers... and so on. and while i don't personally like things that are overly dark or cruel, it's not that i think they're bad, just that with moments like that it's a lot better imo that a point is being made or they add something to the story, and that it doesn't feel soullessly random or disrespectful. unfortunately this stops being the case for the rest of the expansion..... like something about the weird eldritch feeling of fandaniel pulling you out of your body and putting you in a random soldier's was throwing me off immensely. it felt like i was playing a different game, like so disconcerting i found it distracting, because why would he not just do this to screw you over more often? i didn't understand them having access to such an unrestrained power. at the same time it was also just too wacky to really take seriously despite the apparent gravity of what was happening. zenos inside of my bunny girl's body??? i don't even understand why they did it? to piss you off?? the duty where you play as the imperial soldier was interesting i guess but i couldn’t understand what the meaning behind being made to struggle through that experience was... like didn't we just spend all that time sympathising with the garleans and wrap that section up already? why do i now need to sympathise with/experience firsthand what its like to be a garlean footsoldier? and it annoyed me because these parts felt emotionally rich, like stumbling across those garleans fighting that machine and trying to do your best to help them; dragging yourself across the ground to get to your friends before something bad happens to them, and running towards them before zenos hurts them while in your body--i thought all of that could've been really poignant if not for the actual situation being so silly?? they could have just kept some of those ideas, wol dragging themselves across the ground for eg--the extent to which they're willing to stop harm from reaching their friends (which reminds me of what vrtra says to you about the importance of protecting your friends the first time you meet him. but that was such a one-off moment that goes nowhere... i just wish ew would pick something, anything, to be a poignant message about love on planet earth if they want nihilism to be the main villain, and just stick to it)--and do something that felt a lot more relevant to the established story thus far? just felt totally pointless

what makes this worse is this ridiculous part is iirc right after fandaniel reveals that the entity tempering all of the garleans is varis reanimated as an ancient oh-so-important primal...?? like here's (what i thought was going to be) an actually important point in the story being sidelined for a moment that just goes absolutely nowhere. they certainly made it seem important for a moment, and i think this would've rounded off what was being said about garlemald well; the garleans are so taken in by the farce of their homeland that they think varis is calling them to reclaim their country over the radio, but all along what's actually causing their nation to fall apart is this monstrous version of their late emperor. the irony would've been interesting but they just do nothing with it... (i think desecrating a dead person's corpse by turning it into a monster is really weird btw, even weirder that they do it for no reason. whatever ew is weird.) i thought, considering that this plotline was being established from before endwalker started, that anima was going to take some time. not so. ffxiv would rather have you and zenos enact tropes from a disney channel movie. you merk that guy at the end of the tower of babil and from then on every important plot point the expansion could possibly have moves at fucking mach 567472838758745745

because why all of a sudden are you getting beamed up to the moon? and fighting ZODIARK? i was so confused when asahi i mean fandaniel was punching shit into that fuckgin allagan computer like fandaniel what the fuck are you talking about... i couldn't process anything that happened here. like i'll willingly put aside boring practicalities like why anyone can breathe on the moon, but not so much how fast this all happened and how out of nowhere--is this the reason fandaniel is also amon btw? so that he can use their allagan computers to do this? bc i honestly can’t find any other reason why him being amon is relevant when they revealed that in the tower of zot...like i dont get why that's important

and it doesn't get better after this is the sad thing to me. it doesn't pick itself back up. it is just extremely unfocused right until the endwalker. i was willing to move past getting rid of zodiark so quickly because it's not that i hold standard storytelling rules so dearly in my heart that i need the biggest final boss of the entire series to get a bit more gravitas. it actually ended up being a pretty interesting decision--dispatching the largest villain at the heart of the game being the catalyst for the biggest catastrophe you've ever heard of. like i like that wol gets played. but the entire mare lamentorum section that follows is disrespectful. this expansion suffers from some extreme tonal dissonance, bc how does wol learn that the final days are now upon them and then proceed to spend their time leisurely touring the moon rabbit facility to tell them that the clothes they’ve made for humans to wear isn’t fashionable? why on god's green earth does that matter at this current juncture? this part is one of the worst story-writing sinkholes in the expansion to me, bc why are the discrepancies between what the loporrits know of humanity vs what humanity is actually like something the story chooses to grapple with? we're building an ark to save humanity, and instead of approaching this in a contemplative or emotional way, the point of conflict they choose is logistics? in the expansion about nihilism? at best this conflict was overly realistic..... mostly it's just boring, and at worst the FINAL DAYS are now upon us, so why am i taste-testing carrots? how could the sharlayans, the most focused group of people on the entire planet, have been collaborating with the loporrits for decades and not even have one of the most basic aspects of staying alive squared away? i’m supposed to not only believe that nobody knew after all that time the lopporits think people only eat carrots, but also waste time on fixing this? whyyyyy would they even devote any time to this at all when there are so many more complicated and interesting ideas that they let flounder bc they rush through them at breakneck pace constantly? we just fucking killed zodiark! is this why they stick urianger up there to do all the fixing actually? to save time offscreen? maybe that's why they chose this asinine chunk of the story to start processing his character? though why they would choose to add more to a plate they can barely balance i don't know. i don’t even feel like getting into what they did with urianger bc it will just piss me off. i think only my love for rabbits and how i will never ever not find urianger precious were stopping me from putting a hex on square enix

the following section of the story is easily the worst part to me in the entire game. like i would rather replay stormblood multiple times in a row than ever sit through the final days coming to thavnair ever again. i've already said bringing back the final days would just be bad; a disservice to the time spent on it in shadowbringers. what more is there to say on that front? nothing. and the way ew utilises the final days tells me that the answer is nothing. it just wanted to unleash the violence of that event on the non-white area and spends an insane amount of time doing it. i can think of no other time in this game where there is so much wanton death and destruction for no useful storytelling reason other than to relish in the cheap shock of witnessing violence, violence they are unwilling to inflict on its white areas, because even in garlemald you only see the aftermath of what happens rather than being in the midst of it. it was actually making me feel fatigued. it was just so much of the same thing over and over with no real meaning to any of it. and that's not to say that meaning justifies suffering, but this is a game.....with a story... first and foremost? there needs to be some kind of reason to move the story forward? but nothing new or inspired is being said, just "the final days are really bad"

i’m actually not even sure where to begin so i’ll start with a glaring issue: i hate that people turn into abominations. people “randomly” turning into monsters just feels too unwieldy--how could there be any sense whatsoever that that situation is controllable? even learning that it's caused by feelings of despair is shit because emotions are so vague, how could there be any worthwhile attempt to control your emotions, let alone while watching your loved ones turn into/be eaten by monsters? this entire part felt so wildly out of hand/unpredictable to me that every single moment onward that wasn't more or less focused on maintaining this extremealy volatile situation felt like an unforgivable lack of priorities. it was extremely distracting to have it hovering over everything; everything else felt absolutely inconsequential in comparison. bc what the fuck do you mean people are randomly turning into monsters?? also the stakes were already really high just knowing the final days were coming, so raising them that much higher felt unnecessary to the point of it being hard to believe. and then bc you know there's no way any character important to wol is going to turn into a monster, subjecting commonfolk npcs to this just feels absurdly cruel, and also just made it obvious how much of a cheap scare it all was, bc it can't have any real narrative importance as a result of only happening to random npcs. it was all so blatantly fake-deep. there was no meaning behind them originally being people except for the useless horror of it--the scions still referred to them as monsters to be put down rather than as the people they used to be, just like any other monster in this game. dynamis was more of a retroactive explanation for why people turned into monsters, rather than people turning into monsters bolstering any understanding of dynamis. in shb the sin eaters had some method to them that made them more believable. you fight them throughout the story rather than them just being dropped on you midway through, they helped provide a picture of what kind of world the first was, they were emotional diving boards for characters like alisaie to develop personal goals and so on and so forth... the horror of the sin eaters had a narrative purpose. in endwalker it feels like they didn’t know what to do but wanted to replicate parts of shadowbringers, but didn't know why those parts worked so well bc they're too obsessed with trying to shock their audience. this part just sucked beyond description.

and it just continues to get worse. how can you be the one writing the parametres of a situation and you create something that's literally unmanageable, so that when its only manageable bc you need it to be, it's just so obviously shit writing? my sister described endwalker's writing as really contrived, like when they need something to happen (and that thing is often a really bad idea) they just shove it in there at the cost of keeping their characters in character, or having their story threads--both the interesting ones and the stupid ones--fall totally flat. she says they shortcut the writing. and it's true. for eg, the characters literally don't feel like themselves at times, or get utilised in really moronic ways. like when wol just watches the satrap die, another cheap scare btw he literally gets grabbed an eaten in a way my sis (i was ranting to her a lot about this game ok) described as straight from attack on titan. just gets grabbed and eaten. and this happens to him for such asinine reasons: 1. so that this random asf plot point of vrtra revealing himself as the true satrap can bear fruit. for some fucking reason. i struggle to understand why this is important at all but i guess it's yet another little sideplot that ew just can't seem to resist adding to its already towering plate at the plot buffet, like whatever is going on with urianger and moenbryda's parents/the loporrits, or zenos who now spends most of his time offscreen, or the twins and their father, etc, bc ew likes to waste time 2. so that g'raha (???????????????????????) out of fucking nowhere can have a big boy moment and direct the scions and the people of thavnair in their time of need. what on earth was that scene supposed to be? fanservice? a reminder that g'raha was a leader back in the first? which blows my mind bc mere moments before he had a scene i really enjoyed despite the circumstances, where after a man witnesses his son get turned into a beast and then stepped on by another beast because endwalker is literally jacking itself off to suffering and expects me to be doing the same... g’raha goes up to this man and stops him from panicking and turning into a monster himself. while i don't think any of this should be happening, i thought it was a nice take on his character to have a more sensitive moment in such a harrowing situation. i don't know, have a character demonstrate some emotional skills instead of the usual fighting ones. ofc all of this i thought mere moments before disaster. why was any of this necessary? literally why not just have the satrap, i don't know, take charge of his country when he's needed most, even if he's only been a figurehead the whole time? why let him go out so horribly when he obvious loves his people with his whole heart just so that vrtra can step in without any sort of conflict? i don't understand the focus on vrtra at all

and it actually just keeps getting worse.. the following part where you have to find matsya's friends at palaka's stand was awful. the friends have a newborn baby, so it's obvious that only that baby is surviving bc ew is convinced you don't know how harsh the world is yet. that must be why this part is so long? i'm repeating myself but so many other things that shouldn't be rushed get rushed, only for ew to devote a lot of time to sections like this where nothing changes or develops except for compounding how bad it all feels. i think it was at this point actually, that i realised endwalker actually had some underlying point it was trying to make. it would've been impossible not to realise bc of how heavy-handed it is. i'm not even going to try and paraphrase bc it was so random the way it was introduced i thought i had missed some lines of dialogue or something when it happened:

the suddenness of this felt like when a writer forsakes trying to show what a story is about and instead opts to speak to their audience directly through poorly disguised self-inserts. like i know things are bad right now guys, but the preaching tone of this is jarring. like maybe if you spent some time trying to develop your themes you wouldn't have to be doing this endwalker. i know you need your final villain to literally parrot these ideas for the rest of the game, but if this was supposed to be such a core point of the story why wait all the way until now to just beat me over the head with it? was watching a child be crushed underfoot supposed to make elderly man of palaka using the phrase "at journey's end" seem profound?

anyways then you go and try to save matsya’s friend (the mother bc the father has now died, of course). this leads us to another forced decision that doesn’t make any sense: alisaie and alphinaud fail to kill a single abomination--just the one solitary abomination that was stalking the poor woman--so that we can see it fling her into the water and her corpse dangling on the surface. in what fucking world do alisaie and alphinaud, who have single-handedly dispatched numerous abominations prior to reaching this point, fail to kill just one of them between the two of them in a way reminiscent of a cartoon, one being knocked into the other and them both falling over? how is that fucking possible? and then to somehow make things worse, because that's still possible, despite the fact that wol spends this entire segment in palaka’s stand being told by alisaie and alphinaud not to leave matsya alone because he can’t fend for himself, the twins suggest sending him back on his own to deliver the baby to palaka's stand? why??????????????????????????????

this is what i mean when i say the characters get used in the most bullshit ways for the most bullshit reasons. it's like the game needs as much suffering as possible to happen so that it can make a worthwhile point on this later on (spoiler: it doesn't) so it pulls shit like this. why would the twins, who we just watched try to spoonfeed the garleans cereleum straight from the tank, leave matsya on his own if not solely bc the story needs the doomerism of the Resolute Citizen to ring true? and this is also what i mean when i say the scions try to manage a disaster that is just not manageable, bc they for some reason believe that bc they've taken care of the abominations they saw in the area, that means the area is safe enough for matsya to go back on his own? like are we just suddenly pretending the nature of these creatures doesn't imply that anyone can turn into one at any moment? everyone is ALWAYS in danger? we're just going to mill around while matsya weathers the most potent fear of his life running back to the village on his own, with the baby of his friends who just died moments before, while we all know that extremely negative emotions cause people to turn into the monsters? why are we doing this after we just went to so much trouble keeping people safe (or failing to, really)? forget turning into monsters for a sec, why are we even letting him experience such painful emotions at all? anyways the fucking baby starts turning into a monster because this is endwalker.. but i will say that matsya running and chanting that little piece up there about how life is suffering to try and convince me it's true calm himself down was one of the cutscenes i liked the most from this entire part, maybe endwalker in general. it was another one of those emotionally poignant and well-executed moments that just suffers from how much i wish it was happening under totally different circumstances. i don't even remember why one of us doesn’t go with him, like i don't remember what we were busy doing bc it was that unimportant--no wait, i remember! we were waiting for matsya to reach the total end of his rope so that when all things seem lost, when those monsters obviously show up on his path back to the village out of nowhere like they've been doing the past painstaking quest after quest of this entire part, estinien and vrtra can get this really cool moment of jumping into save him! it all makes so much sense now. i've never seen estinien do anything really cool before like diving down from the sky with his lance, so i understand how this was a really important moment that the game needed to make happen. also how vrtra really needs to prove to the people he can be a good satrap bc ahewann just died and all. yeah, i totally get it. perfect. just great. 

what is the message behind despair turning you into a monster? we're about to get into it with meteion and try to convince her she's wrong--come out championing the idea that suffering is just one of the many aspects of life we need to accept, and yet we're going to preface that with a part where to feel despair is bad? you get punished if you do it? honestly?

whatever. elpis...we go here because we need to learn about the elpis flower. i'm thinking we're definitely just going to ask the watcher, right? like the guy on the moon who told us the name of the flower in the first place? and time is of the fucking essence here, so surely we just go back to the watcher and ask him what we need to know and come back? wrong. we're going back to the first. to talk to elidibus. i thought we killed elidibus? does nobody truly die in this game except for my favourite character? so wol gets sent back to the first, and there's this upbeat tonally dissonant little section where you catch up with some old friends like beq lugg and those kids you helped back in shb bc now is just the perfect time for pleasantries and remembering how good shadowbringers was. ew trying to relive shadowbringers was already something i was feeling out in thavnair fighting leagues of "terminus" creatures and not "forgiven" ones, and watching the carefully constructed horror and gravity of the final days get reduced to an average apocalyptic shitshow. so i can't say i appreciated this part. also people are indiscriminately turning into monsters. i can't help but have that hang over everything constantly until the end of the expansion.

anyways we go to the crystal tower and drag out elidibus even though i personally prefer when characters have their final moments and are properly laid to rest. like i hate to not only beat a dead horse but also reanimate said horse and then drag its corpse around. well fuck what i want. so elidibus willingly does this favour for us i guess and sends us to the past somehow with some useless warnings about how we won't be able to interact with our surroundings or change the past. i say useless because the former is just untrue, i'm not sure why he bothered to say it. the moment we step foot on elpis you get a nice gift of aether from emet-selch that renders you tangible and now you can proceed to live love laugh with him and hythlodaeus on elpis even though people are indiscriminately dying back home. and the latter warning, well. i don't know, that just seemed obvious. i'm kind of just a hater.

time to be positive again for a short moment, if you can believe it? emet-selch is one of my favourite characters. i enjoyed this new light cast on him...for a short while. i like his relationship with hythlodaeus and i really like hythlodaeus; i’m really fond of the faceless simulacrum version of him you meet in shb and i'm really fond of him now. learning about the unsundered world in person rather than through hearsay was interesting, and although i can't lie and say i don't think this all kind of felt like a huge tangent despite the important aspects of the plot that come out of it, i still like it. i guess it feels this way because a lot of big plot points have already been established, like the ark on the moon and the sharlayans' involvement and the final days, so this was all kind of too big to me to be coming this late into the story. it doesn't feel all that relevant to prior parts of the expansion either except for hermes, who has been poorly developed throughout, so okay, i get it. it's time to give one of the main villains some depth (i want you to guess if this is successful or not). hermes has a lot of qualities i really like. has a child, secretly nurturing a potent sadness, thinks differently from the world around him because at his core he’s too deeply empathetic…. even though i was still largely aware of the insanity happening back at home which i'm going to keep repeating, i still enjoyed elpis At The Start. the exposition of this part was easily better than its resolution. it was taking the time to develop hermes’ character so that you could see if the game was written well anyhow how he became the fandaniel of the present. i really liked his relationship with meteion too. it's getting hard to talk about what i like without simultaneously talking about what i don't like so i'm going back to criticising now, positivity over, sorry....

personally, i’d have been totally fine without any more development to emet-selch’s character. i think it was nice to see a fresh perspective on him and all, really rounds out who he is from what you know and what he talks about in shadowbringers. and i actually like a lot of the things he said throughout, not all of it, but a good amount of it was fun and sorely needed whenever hermes was being annoying, which was often. but there was a lot of times wehere i thought, i don't really need to be hanging out with emet-selch right now? i don't need my wol and emet-selch to be friends? considering who he is....? .............and what's going on back home? how many more moments showing how endearingly prickly he is do i need to see? like sure, i can enjoy this emet-selch fest in isolation of what's going on because me love emet-selch like it's not like i think these moments are bad or anything but i don't know, don't we have other things to be doing? i'm not diametrically opposed to fanservice, i like when things are kept fresh and lighthearted. but. well you know by now. about the people turning into monsters. i guess i just both enjoyed this part and wished it happened under different circumstances or in a different way or something, or maybe not at all, bc as things progress his character just gets more and more diluted.

i actually really liked meteion. i will say i’m really tired of non-human, overly childish girl children creature characters who become villains, because i think there's this concept where…idk how to say it? i wish i could find something that talks about this more... it's like the dehumanisation involved when non-binary characters or non-white characters are often not human (not that these things are done in the same way). but i feel like women or females ig are often the ones chosen to be non-human in this particular way...? like, when emotional labour is involved. or when it needs to be some taboo evil entity. it's like a guy and his part-animal female second lead or part-alien love interest or female-voiced ai system or android or abandoned girl he finds/rescues. it's kind of like the born sexy yesterday trope but without the blatant sexuality (i don't want to go on a tangent). quite often this weird quirky alien and playful girl child is a harbinger of destruction. take drakengard, for example, or fire emblem engage, or cc from code geass iirc, or veronica from fire emblem heroes.. there's apparently something about childishness and girlishness and innocence and corrupting that innocence or being fooled by that innocence that seems to incite fear of the unknown enough in people for villainous children to be a trope in general regardless of gender, but it was just something i was thinking about in regards to meteion's character, especially when she becomes evil. and this blurry line between her as a "being" with a consciousness and free well as GIVEN to her by hermes, and her as a "tool" to be used by him as well, doesn't really get addressed in any meaningful way at all. like sure, she doesn't need to eat but she can still enjoy candy apples and flowers, and can empathise bc often of her own volition she wants to cheer hermes up, but actually her ability to empathise is programmed; so let's send send her, this highly empathetic being (with consciousness and free will and tastes and personality) into the cold expanse of space for as long as it takes for hermes to find his answer, that's totally fine. why did he make it a girl? why couldn't they address the fact that the loneliest bastard in this entire game made himself a child? like i'm not saying there needs to be clear-cut definitions on what meteion is or why she or hermes take certain actions, but it feels like a lot of things regarding their characters are really complex and implied to be really deep, and then just don't go anywhere or are completely ignored or unexplained? and because these things are so present yet passed over, it leaves me genuinely confused about most of what happens on elpis and how these two specifically reach any of the conclusions they do once things start going south

like i thought what she and hermes were going to add to the story was going to be a lot more interesting and complex than what it turned out to be.....a banal mantra on the "mercy" of nihilism. i can barely reconcile what bothers hermes in the first place with what meteion concludes from her sisters' expeditions, like they almost feel irrelevant to each other. he's upset over man's lording over who deserves to live and the callousness of making and unmaking life. he feels sadder about the coming death of his friend than the average ancient, and doesn't want to accept meaningless platitudes about dying for the good of the star. ok, i agree with that. so he wants to know what meaning there is to life, if it can be so easily judged and discarded...? okay. so his answer is to....secretly create creatures without any of the rigourous testing they usually go through to prevent them from being dangerous, and then send them on a potentially dangerous and traumatising mission to answer his vague philosophical questions? like.......? so when she reports back traumatised and tells him every single society out there is suffering (which i just find so unbelievable btw), then the answer to his question must be that suffering is the meaning of life--which she figures bc she's an entelechy so i imagine she's highly susceptible to her emotional surroundings, and because his pseudo-intellectual question is so poorly framed (something only emet-selch points out in a throwaway line btw). and this alone spurs him on to allowing meteion to unmake their entire society in the most violent way conceivable? you literally tell him that the final days are coming as a result of his actions, but he's fine with it because he'd rather that than enact some policy changes at his workplace, or talking to someone? everyone seemed to listen and respect his decision when he suggested helping that creature learn to fly instead of just killing it, i'm sure he could've talked it out? isn't he in charge of the place? this entire section was so hard for me to follow bc i kept thinking something more complex was making everyone behave the way they were, when it was actually just totally senseless.

as an aside, i hate how they chose to make the way meteion reports information so cooly technological btw, it felt not only anachronistic but corny. i’m sure there's a better way to have her impartially report things without making her sound like she's reporting weather conditions on some distant planet in star trek. anyways, when you frantically search for meteion after she receives her transmission was another part that took up a lot of time for no reason. it just made everything feel so dire when i could barely understand why any of what was going on was such a big deal. and i’ll never be one to say that any bureau of anything should “detain” anyone, but why hermes was so frantic to prevent meteion from being brought to the convocation i just don't know. like he goes on the run with her so that he can hear the end of her report? is that really it? i just find it hypocritical that he doesn't want her to be sent to the convocation where they'll limit her free will or fucking whatever but he's totally fine with ordering the meteia into space? why am i being made to guess what the convocation is going to do to meteion when hermes is making it seem like such a big deal?? what fucking sense does that make? what on earth was he afraid of? their judgment? the convocation members deciding whether meteion is good for the star or not? could they not have just reasoned this out? aren’t they a "highly advanced" and "reasonable" society? like okay he sees through the veil of his utopian home but i just did not get a sense of how much it was bothering him at all, like i cannot stress enough how him going turbo feels like an insane jump from what his problems seemingly were. why did nobody stop to think this through or communicate to each other? is it because of the bullshit time paradox this game has trapped us in so that nothing we do will amount to anything anyways so we might as well make the most confused villain of all time be responsible for the biggest event in this game's history?

but it annoys me because meteion and hermes felt like such a waste of potential, maybe the biggest waste to me in the entire expansion. i was really intrigued by their wholesome relationship at the start, knowing that hermes was a main villain. and that he can't find connection or meaning in an otherwise "perfect" society, so he has to create it for himself and try to find it elsewhere, as far as the reaches of outer space... he wants to make what's hurting him stop hurting him. i like that he approaches such human desires with meteion despite her non-humanness, and that she can return those feelings to him. he wants to signify meteion’s return with a flower because they both like flowers… like those things we can’t put into words but share with others, moments, emotions, connections……..but nope. nihilism beam. it feels like the worst sort of retroactive writing ever. they didn't even think too hard about dynamis--this hugely important thing, except nobody has ever heard of it, aside from nidhana back at home? while members of the highest office in the most advanced society earth has ever had are left squinting.

and the entire section after you fight hermes just pissed me off. we kicked his ass so that we could stop him from inciting meteion any further, and yet we just let him hear her out anyways? he's yelling at you during the entire dungeon that he just wants the time to hear her out, we're chasing after him so that we can stop him from doing that, and then we just let him hear her out anyways? and then even when we do that she doesn’t even say anything different? she just goes right back to reporting on different worlds and how self-destructive they are and That's All She Really Proceeds To Say For The Rest Of The Expansion But Fucking Who Cares Anymore. so we let her repeat herself. this sends her into a spiral, because she's an entelechy who just got hit by a high frequency nihilism beam, but subjecting her to all that despair is only ever addressed by one of the scions in a throwaway line near the very end of the story in ultima thule... and then hermes...captures venat, emet-selch and hythlodaeus??? he captures two of the strongest characters in the game? did we not just kick hermes’ ass??? what is going on?

emet-selch: that's bullshit, and you know it's bullshit

hermes: *says more bullshit*

i really think hermes might be one of the worst villains in the game. it's a shame bc i think he's such an interesting character. i'm not sure why he started behaving like such an incel when he was right to be troubled by the things he was? why did they even bother have wol relate to him over experiencing sadness from loss if that just went totally nowhere? why does he behave so hypocritically? being saddened by loss leads to him setting the stage for the final days? him hating man's jurisdiction over other lives leads to him wiping emet-selch's and hythlodaeus' memories, and subjecting the entire planet to the worst test ever? he's not even morally grey or anything! just annoying! i saw someone say that it's even worse that he wants the ancients to prove that their life is meaningful to them, bc it's true, they do??? like isn't that what venat interrupts them from doing in the answers cutscene, calling back for that lost life? isn't that what you learn in shadowbringers? didn't an entire half of their population sacrifice themselves so that the other half could live? what the fuck else did they need to prove?

this part was pissing me off even more because i never even wanted hythlodaeus or emet-selch to learn about where wol came from or about the final days coming in the first place. i thought that was an awful writing decision. telling them just felt weirdly cruel to me considering elidibus explicitly told you there was nothing you could do to change it. maybe this is just my opinion, but why would anybody want to know that their planet is going to go up in flames and there is nothing they can do to stop it? telling venat i was like sure, she becomes hydaeyln so this makes a little more sense to me, but the other two…….? this is around when i was getting tired of the emet-selch cameo, because i don't really care to know what he thinks of his future self? i couldn't really understand what the point of any of that was? so it annoyed me even further that it amounts to nothing anyways when they get their minds conveniently erased. it felt like a fucking joke. why did we revive these characters, develop them, and then just treat them like tools...? like now that we're done using their powers and creation magicks--i thought, naively--we just toss them aside? like ohhhhh noooooo now they won't remember all the fun we had on elpis this is so sad......but at least before he got his memories wiped emet-selch, even though he definitely totally doesn't believe a fucking word i say, renews his shb vows to wol and leaves the future in my hands again? yeah, i totally wanted to hear him say that a second time. forget how deeply affecting and important a moment that was at the end of shadowbringers. i really needed to see him do that one more time in this shittier, more contrived context. that's really what i needed from endwalker. also i've been on reddit reading what people have to say about endwalker out of curiosity (ppl make a lot of good points that i haven't) and someone pointed out that moments before all this happens venat literally pulls memories from the aether around you so that we can watch hermes send the meteia to space. what on earth is stopping anyone from doing that for hermes, hythlodaeus, and emet-selch? but whatever, i already know the writing doesn't care how silly it is anymore. two of the strongest ancients get bound by a weakened hermes, only break out after the story conveniently needed meteion to start flying into space, and then venats lets her escape somehow even though doing so essentially dooms their entire planet. ok

so we’re back home and we have to go immediately help the thavnarians who are being punished for not being white again. the sharlayans were going to bring them to the teleporter to the moon in garlemald to start getting them on the moon, but oops, the final days have come to garlemald, so now we can't use the teleporter, so if you're thavnarian your life sucks. who saw that coming? absolute waste of time. so then we have to get rid of more beasts because we need to waste even more time doing something we already spent an agonising amount of time doing in thavnair. and then immediately after this we need to......wrap up yet another asinine plot thread endwalker is so obssesed with adding to it's already convoluted story: fourchenault excommunicating his children...? it seemed really important when he did this in post-shb, but materially nothing for alphinaud or alisaie really changed, everyone still gets into sharlayan no problem. ultimately i just didn’t really know why they chose to pursue this mini-plot at all because how many more pushes does alphinaud (i'm saying alphinaud bc he does not share that spotlight with alisaie lmfao) need to become resolute in his goals? he already does this throughout the series? they ruined arenvald's legs in post-shb so that alphinaud could become more resolute in his goals, why keep dedicating time to this? just keep juggling endwalker, just keep juggling. anyways we’re in garlemald, we calm the final days for now, zenos shows up out of nowhere to remind us he’s still in the game. and to be fair to him that was one of the most interesting cutscenes he’s had the whole time, and, get this--they have him randomly answer hermes' question? about the meaning of life? while talking to jullus? like jullus gets mad at him for not giving a fuck about causing what happened to garlemald, and zenos responds by saying: "ask any creature of this star and those above for answers, and they will tell you what suits their fancy. and they would be right to do so. what meaning there is to be found in the petty vicissitudes of your existence must be gleaned by you and you alone." like......? he just provides the answer right there in a conversation with jullus? did this expansion have any interest at all in putting any of its different parts in conversation with each other, or are we supposed to just try and build a good story like a puzzle, where the pieces, albeit interesting, don't actually fit together? weren't zenos and fandaniel working together at the beginning of the expansion? he should have just posed this question to zenos because the answer was apparently right fucking there, with the flattest character in the entire game, this whole time? whatever, i still liked this scene. alisaie putting a curse on zenos was very cool of her. so we're back in garlemald and....….tonal dissonance! puddingway shows up. cute scene where g’raha’s ears perk up also bc he's the one who hears the loporrits coming. just in case you forgot about g’raha, which is an oxymoron. and then maybe the second worst segment of endwalker...........we go back to labryinthos. 

now i love labryinthos. i thought it was interesting we only collected one aetheryte the first time we were there, and i was hoping the place would be as intriguing to me as it first was when we got back. admittedly learning that the sharlayans' secrecy only amounted to contributing to the moon project was kind of a let down, but i thought maybe there was still more to it. i mean, an ark to the moon? the abandonment of one's home planet? it's not like the ideas aren't there. let's go back to elpis for a second. one of the moments that really stood out to me during that part was a throwaway line that emet-selch says to wol after hermes starts freaking it:

he's right. i don't think hermes found society so truly beyond help that he couldn't turn to any one of his peers for help before devising such a reckless plan. but i'm not trying to rehash my issues with hermes, more that i think an interesting parallel could have been made, possibly, with the ark flying to the moon as currenlty the most viable solution to the final days problem? challenging this notion of just throwing it all away as a last resort? especially because it's so obvious to me that by the end of this expansion nobody is actually going into space to start a new life out there; trying to sort out living accomodations and acquaint the lopporits properly with earth is just a waste of time. so why not pose the underlying question of the entire expansion, about what makes life meaningful, to the last bastion of hope in the entire universe--the sole planet amongst millions of dead stars that still believes in itself? would it not just be free real estate to try and connect this story's multiple parts together by ...connecting this story's multiple parts together? the scions say repeatedly how much they'd prefer to protect their planet rather than leave it, and everyone on earth vouches for you because they don't want to leave, either. could they not have made a connection in some way between that ark and the meteia's voyage to outer space? could the writing not have turned around and asked the actual inhabtants of the planet of that we've helped and saved and laughed with and broken bread with or whatever the fuck what they think about the meaning of life, now that they have to leave that life behind? i guess fucking not??? i guess endwalker would rather only highlight civilians when they're being turned into abominations to drive home the same points about life = suffering constantly, and not the points about how despite the suffering life needs to be lived? because they don't actually seem to care about challenging meteion's nihilism when that can just be lazily solved by beating her up at the end. hermes could have been learning to love the world he was on, the smaller things that make it beautiful. because that's what he does, he creates this creature that is built to understand him, and it does and it shares these small joys with him. but nope, time to waste time doing fetch quests in labryinthos. find every single researcher who is obviously losing their mind with stress in labryinthos and give them their government-assigned lopporit while this hectic music with only one minute's worth of loop value plays in the background. go and deliver these papers with alisaie and alphinaud bc if you do a former friend of their father’s will tell them that their father actually loves them duh that’s why he disrespects them publicly every chance he gets. go follow one of the lopporits around while they sample fruits so that they can learn to make food other than carrots. go and watch urianger reconcile with moenbryda's parents even though she died all the way back in a realm reborn. fuck you. also everyone is still just a bad day away from turning into an abomination. just in case you forgot.

that shit where asahi shows up to take fandaniel away for the final time might be top three most bizarre scenes in all of final fantasy fourteen btw. i almost didn't want to mention it, but i need it on record how silly i thought that was. we are in the final stages of this expansion and it still can't stop wasting time. did we see ardbert's thoughts on elidibus using his body? no. but asahi was who they chose to get upset about this? ok.

i liked the trial against mother. you might have noticed i've had very little to say on venat this whole time. that might just have to be its own post or something if nobody is sick of me by now. but anything to do with working together with your friends to overcome a trial is good.

that's what i liked about ultima thule. at the same time, this is where the game finally just loses me forever. i think, somehow, even despite all the things i didn't like, the way the story is told i still enjoyed, even if what it was saying was often. bad. there's still a lot of moments i really liked despite it all. but after ultima thule i was just done. we get on the ark. great. i like that things don't go as planned because meteion intercepts our ship. but now meteion is finally here, which means it's finally time for me to reckon with the pseudo-intellectual nihilism she's been touting every chance she gets. it's hard for me to suspend my disbelief that every single society out in space wanted oblivion, but if that's what endwalker wants me to believe for the sake of its story making sense (oxymoron) then fine. ok. but that's all that's ever said. "life is suffering" "life is suffering" "the final days are really bad"

just the same pseudo-intellectual browbeating about how living just leads to constant strife and the most beautiful thing to do is to just end it all for everyone ever again. like sure, empath hears death cry repeatedly--i can see how meteion could change so permanently. i think that's fine. i doubt that's why she's so repetitive. i genuinely just 't think there's nothing anyone really had to say on this. and the thing is, we've heard this argument before? the idea that humanity is imperfect so they don't deserve to live? it will all amount to nothing, so why let it continue to exist? these are major points of conflict from shadowbringers because it's what emet-selch was always saying. the difference is that emet-selch is just an easily more interesting and fleshed out character whose arguments are largely more complicated, even if they're just as morally wrong. like it's extremely easy for me to answer whatever meteion is saying with a resounding no. and while i feel that emet-selch can also be easily disagreed with on what he believes, bc i do disagree--he at least introduces ideas that complicate the story and his own character. he challenges the scions on their hatred of primals--their god is a primal. he offers visions of a world where nobody has to struggle ever again, where strife doesn't exist, and so on and so forth. while that doesn’t justify his actions, nor do i think they should, i think he at least gives the characters something to think about. he throws their own actions back at them. why would the scions not want a world without suffering? when emet-selch asks alphinaud if he believes half of the sundered world would give up half of their number to save the other half, alphinaud is unable to answer because he knows that the answer is no. i don't think humanity should be tested, let alone with such an insane standard, but i at least think that the questions being asked in shadowbringers were interesting. there's a point to them. with meteion, all she basically says to the scions is that she’s going to fucking kill everyone they know and love in the worst way possible. nothing to chew on that wouldn't better be solved by just getting rid of the threat. i don't know why they even bother arguing with her ever. she doesn't even feel like a character to me in that last section of the game. and they keep trying to have her seem all scary by having her get really close to the screen or move around without warning which is all very silly to me. i at least did like how much of a threat she was, and the way thancred vanished, and then everyone finds themselves in that dark area in front of the ship wondering where he is while the ultima thule music plays for the first time, distantly and quietly. i actually really liked that part. i thought it was really moving. i wish it had stayed that way.

the first area of ultima thule was the best part imo. i liked the immense darkness and quiet and lack of wind and the foul air and  yet, green grass. i liked the strange horror of being the only person at first who could really see the dragons, and then learning that estinien can see them too. i liked how that was the segue for his sacrifice. having those "final" moments with a specific scion each time until that climactic moment that pushes the group forward i really liked. i liked that thancred was no longer with them but still with them, a presence over them keeping them safe from harm. i found that very touching. but i was actually really confused while going through ultima thule becuase of how they visually shows what happens, like while the swirling vortex each scion would stand in was cool, and then standing to face off against that dark bird, i think what those things actually represented i just did not really understand what was actually being done or going on. i think that might be because dynamis suffers a bit from being just too nebulous or underdeveloped. i don't mind how abstract of a concept it is, i mean aether is used to do all sorts of never-explained things all the time.. it's more like... if ultima thule is going to be a place ruled by emotions, with laws different from what the scions are used to, it's hard for me to see how they were able to really draw any conclusions about where they were or what to do. it actually kind of reminded me of the logic of jojo's bizarre adventure where an attack only overrules another attack not becuase of some fundamental power scale the reader understands, but bc of what araki feels like contriving to get the story moving the way he wants. and that's fine because it's jojo. but this is ffxiv, so in my mind ultima thule should have either remained abstract and they don't try to explain the rules of the place so much, or they should’ve just made what was going on less abstract if they were going to try to logic the place out

what i mean is: the scene where estinien argues with that dragon so that he can overcome its despair is really cool. i liked that he turned into a cool wind. i liked that your friends sacrificed themselves for the sake of their home, that the power of their hopes for wol to overcome this final challenge was the only way they could move forward in such a stagnant place, as well as the only way they could be protected by meteion's violence. but after estinien does it--and he admits that he doesn't know how, just that it was the right thing to do--it feels like the writing immediately tries to specify what's going on so that there's some easy way forward the scions just have to follow the rulebook for, so that they can get to meteion. when urianger takes wol and g'raha aside i was actually just so lost. i don't know what it was i wasn't getting. i still don't. like to kind of say that there’s always one "individual" in these fake worlds who is despairing more than the others that can be located if they just identify a certain set of behaviours... this kind of just waters down what the scions are doing and the magic of being at the universe's end or w/e to me. we use language because of our inability otherwise to really express the depth of emotions and sensations that exist in this world, not the other way around--trying to box in something so complex through things like processes and so on...so to try and narrow down this part kind of rung a bit hollow to me. it was somehow both overexplained and underexplained at the same time. this might seem kind of nitpicky but i guess it was just hard for me to enjoy ultima thule when i was genuinely confused almost the whole way throughout. and bc the ea and the omicrons were so goddamn annoying. trying to do this slapdash learning about their societies at the very end of the game was just like...? okay? why bother, all they really care about is dying anyways. and then that final dungeon, ew's final attempt at replicating the wins of shadowbringers (the amaurot dungeon) with meteion's voice over. like who cares now meteion, you are somehow still just repeating yourself. endwalker is almost at it's end girl, i get it. everyone wants to die.

where i actually started to get annoyed though was where y'shtola says in no uncertain terms not to use the retcon crystal hydaelyn gave you to call their spirits back. y'shtola, you shouldn't have bothered, because you know wol is going to do absolutely that. why even have her say it? there is no sense of risk whatsoever because that crystal is involved. i still liked the sacrificing, but maybe they should have framed it in a way where it wasn't obvious that the scions were going to be totally fine. ew literally didn't seem ballsy enough to kill all of the scions, and i don't think it should've either. but then it just makes this all very wishy-washy. and even worse was when wol used it to summon HYTHLODAEUS AND EMET-SELCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHY!!!!!!!! WHYYYYYYYYYYYY?????????????? i was so annoyed. i'm still annoyed. back when their memories got wiped hythlodaeus was like oh yeah by the way emet did you know that in the aetherial sea you can get your memories back haha? and i was like okay cool so when they die they can get their memories back, whatever, still don't think me and emet-selch should've been live love laughing on elpis. i didn’t actually think this game would be so juvenile as to let you get to meet them once more with their memories fully intact. i don't know why ew has to dot every i and cross every t and sign off every single bit of intrigue with the biggest fucking full stop The End ever where emet-selch is concerned, holy fuck man. i hated this decision so much. your friends SACRIFICE THEMSELVES so that WOL can face meteion. they believe that at the very end of everything, hydaelyn believes that at the very end of everything, WOL is the one who can defeat meteion. they all put so much faith in you. and the first thing you do is summon emet-selch and hythlodaeus because what? because you just can't fucking help yourself? just shit all over the importance of carrying your friends’ beliefs in you. christ i hated that. i loved seeing the elpis flowers grow all over that fake sun. why couldn't that have been wol who grew them, wol's turn to use dynamis to overcome meteion's despair, flowers that represent the hopes every single person on earth has placed in them to see their star to safety? why? emet-selch there for what? to set in stone his position as the Tsundere once and for all? is that it? to have him renew his vows to wol for the millionth time just in case you forgot that he wants you to take up the mantle of their future? i wish they would go back to never making emet-selch palatable and less hostile to the warrior of light, it feels like such a disservice to the character he was in shadowbringers and to just their characters in general like i do not want to be canon friends with emet-selch! it's not necessary! it's fucking emet-selch! what's even worse is that for some reason while the flowers are growing, emet-selch is just point blank explaining what's going on. he literally says something like, "these flowers are the hopes of everyone meteion you're washed. by the way, if you didn't catch that, wol. you can summon your friends back now." immersion gone. any sense of playing a game that actually gives a fuck gone. so we call our friends back, only to send them away again with the teleporter because meteion is just too strong for us. to be fair i liked that decision, but why fake me out a second time having me think yes, finally wol is going to face meteion ON HER OWN. and then have ZENOS show up? i actually just stopped playing and went to bed. genuinelly just fuck me. who fucking cares anymore.

and then after you finally get meteion to stop being emo and she offers to reconcile with you by sending you safely back to your friends it's like, actually i can't even accept this meteoin. because i have to go fight zenos now. and then it's crazy to me that after you kick zenos' ass for like the millionth time, we're literally on the edge of the world so i'm finally expecting him to say something worth listening to, he opens his mouth and says "you know, wol, this whole time... i've been so bored... and the only thing that gives me joy is fighting you...” like. stuck record. the writers dragged him all the way out here to be a stuck fucking record

i like endwalker btw. kind of. like i know nobody who reads this is going to believe me but i really do. if it had just, well. i don't even know. there's too much wrong with it. it wastes too much time and just doesn't seem to be able to let go. how is it possible that an expansion can make me tired of callbacks to haurchefant being important to wol? i've never felt that before. like how many more flashbacks to his grave does one need to have to know that when wol is fighting for their world they're fighting for their friends too. but this game just cannot let things go. it NEEDS to make that joke about alphinaud gathering firewood four more times. it makes anything i appreciated the second or maybe even the third time just upset me. they can't let anything go, they have to wave it in front of me like it's a dog treat and i'm a dog. a fucking dog with blonde hair and blue eyes

[yuri-is-online]

I've got a theory question for tdb (bear with me, I've blazed through story so remembering the beginning is a little difficult)

So at the beginning, the anomaly we met was actively texting us right? Said something about how they've "been waiting to see us" or somethin like that

Which we know anomalies can be sentient (especially if we run with the theory with towa). And I dunno, I wanna loop in the time loop theory somewhere here. If we go with the idea of mc being the girl in the tower and her jumping before a loop maybe, then what (or who) is the anomaly we met?

I've been going through the tdb tag to see if you've mentioned it yet and no one has asked, so I figured I would bc I like bouncing theories... I need to hop on tdb reddit

SO I lurk in the discord server some people on the reddit put together and it was pointed out there that shortly after that happened the dev's other game had a Rapunzel themed event 💀💀💀 so that's what the line about the girl in the tower was likely referencing since it makes sense someone like Taiga would "not be into that shit (i.e. not his game) at all." THAT BEING SAID I am so glad you brought up the anomaly in the beginning because there's some stuff about it I find interesting.

I went and took some screenshots from the summoning and the person who commented under that little theory was right in that the person who is falling does land in the woods, so it could be that whoever jumps off of the tower at the end of the loop does end up in the woods somewhere. It might mean nothing, but I'll hold onto this thought just in case.

Dorms rarely cooperate on missions, so Taiga and Haku being on one together is odd. Taiga also does not seem to have lines referencing Haku, but he seems to have given up on trying to escape the timeloop and wants "the others" to join him in his nihilism. I think this sort of goes with his being a gambler who says there is "no trick to winning you just have keep playing" but still desperately looking to the MC for "something I could do different" or a reason. He wants to have hope again but he isn't able to.

I personally think these "others" he talks about are probably Tohma and Romeo, Tohma because he seems to be one of the more active ones working to isolate the traitor and Romeo because that's his best friend. Oh and while I am on the subject of the traitor, someone brought up to me a crack theory about Luca being the traitor and I have seen some votes for Towa too. While I obviously think that it is almost certain to be Haku, I think there is a potential for a faction split between people who agree with whatever Haku's take on the ghoul's situation is and people who agree with Tohma. Luca is a very good candidate for someone who I could see being manipulated into siding with the "evil" side if he thought it meant it was the only way to protect his brother. Towa will go wherever Haru does, and I can't really see Haru siding with Haku if it involves hurting the anomalous creatures in any way. That and Haku seems very convinced that he's in whatever he's in alone.

But to finally answer your question/talk about what's been bugging me: the anomaly who curses the MC takes her into something that reminds me of a cursed domain from JJK and turns the scenery all red. And like you said they text her! Like it's been stalking her for a long time. I hope we get to learn about how Haku's flute works in the Hotarubi chapter because I want to know how and why he was able to take MC out of the anomaly's domain and return her to the train car. That almost made me think he could control it in some way... I'll have to level his affection enough to see what his pfp is in his texts because it it is remotely similar to the one the anomaly uses I will have a stroke.

As for what the anomaly is... it's profile picture is a spider lily and it uses the name "Mina" when talking to MC. It's head has roses, spider lilies and what I think are supposed to be poppies growing on its head. Apparently there is a Chinese legend about spider lilies and I keep seeing the same text copy and pasted everywhere about it, but I feel comfortable sharing what I found since I was able to find it on Wuhan University's English website: (x)

I imagine when we meet whatever monster cursed MC it will be a bit different than whatever is going on here, but MC is talking about how "if she knew it would end like this she never would have fallen for them in the first place." Sure she's just talking about how her favorite band just broke up, but maybe that feeling drew the spirit towards her since it is attracted to/preys on lost loves.

If I am allowed to cope a whole bunch here, I think it would make for solid timeloop building if MC's feelings weren't about the band at all, but about her lost love who jumped off the building at the start of the game. Since the loop has restarted she doesn't remember him, so she thinks her feelings are and directs them towards the band she used to love, but the strength of her disappointment comes from somewhere else.

Thank you very much for your question, it made me think a whole lot!