#but also have very invasive capabilities and can be turned into an issue of privacy very quickly is so true. So when I read the google glas

[beckface]

Bestie rant about the DadBrain AU for us please 🙏😤 we need more of it

ALWAYS you know i'm down

Some headcanons for the vanilla au as it is (if this conflicts with something the og creators said just pretend it’s not there):

(also reminder this is like. My specific version of the au with how I like to interpret the characters sjdhls)

Much like in the actual show the city is unaware of anything about WG’s private life, so they didn’t know she was Boxlietner’s daughter and they don’t know she’s Twobrain’s daughter. HOWEVER, some citizens HAVE been suspicious of Wg’s “True alliances” because they have caught her being friendly with Tb, and the press sees her hanging around his warehouse often

I like to imagine there’s an “episode” in this au where one of the other villains takes advantage of this paranoia, because Fair City is just far too happy to turn on wg, and it spirals into convincing everyone that WG is secretly planning some sort of alien invasion with the help of the eeeeeevil scientist Doctor Twobrains

It’s unclear in the show if the majority of the city knows that Boxlietner is Twobrains, but there were likely a lot of complications with the people who did know Steven before.

Becky tries to keep her parentage a secret after Squeaky happens to avoid being taken away by child services

A rumor spreads that Becky is an orphan among the other kids because Steven is nowhere to be seen ever since he changed into TB

This rumor causes a whole fiasco leading to the authorities indeed being called, and TB has to go through a significant amount of hijinks to prove that he’s still a capable parent. Becky has to help him.

After TB being her father is revealed he is just (in Becky’s eyes) The worst about it. Like this man is the PTA king, he fights with the Karen moms and flirts with every other single (sometimes not single) parent at the school. He flirts with her teacher too which makes Becky actively want to arrest him right then and there. He also brings Becky’s things she forgot at home in THE most flamboyant way possible. He’s not doing it on purpose, he’s just like that, but he’s never opposed to embarrassing his beloved daughter/nemesis. 

Violet is worried for Becky at first and Scoops writes a paper on it. Becky has them over for a playdate and makes tb PROMISE to making Violet feel at ease

Charlie and Meatloaf stay up late and watch Pretty Princess with her behind TB’s back

Whenever TB goes to Jail Becky can just come over and hang out. It’s like their second house at this point.

The other villains are generally very fond of Becky and will chat with her when she’s over at the prison. Whenever they curse wordgirl’s name or vow their revenge in front of her she and TB share a look like “I know something you donnnn’t”

TB teases her relentlessly about both Tobey and Scoops

If TB commits a crime during the school day (he tries not to but the mouse wants what it wants y'know) Sometimes he’ll chastise Becky for leaving school, and Becky is just like ಠ_ಠ

One time TB almost got away with a crime because he also stole her favorite ice cream and said they could have it after dinner if she let him get away. ALMOST.

I like to imagine in this AU whatever father/daughter problems they have don’t really come from Squeaky, that’s just treated like a business thing, but they come from issues that the characters already had (like, yknow, in life)

Steven and TB both have a tendency to get hyper focused on something to the point where Becky might feel a little neglected, but once he gets a sense of this he goes absolutely overboard with trying to make it up to her, and it’s just too much because she just wants to spend time with him

Becky gets really paranoid that her dad is going to hurt himself with an invention, and it only got worse when he became TB. She invades his privacy and invalidates his trust in her around his lab a lot without realizing it because of this.

Steven was really good friends with Sally and Tim, and reconnected with them after the cat got let out of the bag (so to speak) that he was Twobrains. Tj and Becky see each other a lot because of this and still have the exact same sibling dynamic, to the point where they will just refer to each other as “my annoying older sister/annoying little brother” 

The episode where he lets Squeaky take control still happens (Squeaky forces it more this time around) but in this version Becky thinks she can get through to TB that he’s going too far and might actually kill her, so she gets shot and then when TB comes back in control he holds her in his arms yelling for her to come back to him 

After Becky gets the shit kicked out of her and her heart broken in Rhyme and Reason Twobrains decides that he’s permanently grounding her from being a superhero because we as a society need to make that episode even more painful for Becky

It all works out in the end ofc and things go back to the status quo

Twobrains has been secretly trying and failing to make a device that can contact Lexicon for Becky. He’s still trying.

[chrisevansgoodgirl]

red, white, blues in the skies, summer's in the air and baby, heaven's in your eyes

summary: Can you write a daddy kink and spanking fic with Steve? Hes all about it at first but then all hell breaks lose🥵🥵 You know you said somewhere that Steve's so respectful when fucking you and so THOROUGH. Thank you😘😘 --requested by @donutloverxo

i just want to take a moment to thank you so much for messaging me a while back when my friend moved to california. it was a sad night for me but your messages honestly made me feel better. even the ransom one, which i still need more details on. is he okay? i feel like he would cry. anyway, hope you like this!

warnings: everything. anal. choking. spanking. biting, mentions of blood maybe. don’t judge me. hair pulling. breath play. major daddy shit, you know, the usual.

pairing: steve rogers x reader

a/n: so sorry for any typos! i am about to be late for a tattoo appointment! and for that reason, I know i missed some of the people who asked me to tag them in my chris evans fics so i apoloize! so if i did pls message me and i promise i will add you to my tag list in my phone asap!

The question of how you got here—bent over Steve’s thighs, your ass propped up, stripped naked—could have been given many, varying answers, depended on who you asked. Steve would claim it was attitude, sheer disrespect. You would credit it to him not paying enough attention to you. Why you got here, that only had one answer. Because you wanted to be here.

It started last night. You were out with Steve, Sam, Bucky, Wanda, and Okoye. Okoye and Bucky were, when drunk, very simply, philosophical hippies. They wanted to talk about the universe and how we were all destroying the planet and each other. Sam just got plain annoying and needed to annoy Wanda. It was the weirdest thing, he just needed to get on her nerves. He would get competitive about who was drinking more, he would challenge her to anything. Darts, once, a race back to the compound another. That ended terribly, but neither seemed capable of recalling that past a certain level of alcohol intake.

That left Steve, this authoritative presence—always able to get you wet, but when you were drinking, your friends were surrounding you, acting like children, and he was just there, you were hopeless. He was strong and always so sure of himself, that was what you loved most about him.

Everyone was scattered around the bar. You had disappeared for the restroom and once you got out, Wanda and Sam wrangled you into a conversation about who was a better lead on missions.

Steve was at the table, his phone in sight because he was Captain fucking America. He was the most important man in existence and he always needed to be available for his country, or the world, more accurately. That used to be an issue, before Thanos, before they fixed everything. That used to strain your relationship, never knowing when he was going to be called away. It was rare now, so rare, but his habits were tough to break. He had a beer bottle in his hands, sipping here and there, but mostly, he was watching you. Only you. He came out to be a babysitter, but it was barely a job he took seriously.

He just wanted to be with you.

You made your way to him after it seemed Wanda and Sam had forgotten you were there at all. He set his beer down on the table and took your hips. It was a move of pure control, you couldn’t get away from him, but you also couldn’t get closer to him. “What do you say? Should we call it a night?”

“It’s been an hour,” he pointed out.

“I want you to fuck me.”

He lifted his eyebrows. “That’s why you haven’t been drinking much.”

“I missed you, daddy.” Daddy? It was a key to the lock that sometimes was Steve Rogers. Was there anything you couldn’t get him to do while you were calling him daddy?

“How much?”

You scoffed. “What?”

“How much did you miss me?”

“What kind of question is that? I miss you a lot when you’re gone. I ache until you’re back home, falling asleep with me, waking up with me. I understand that you’re a Cancer but you’re being so extra right now.”

“No, I’m just being curious.”

“Do you need me to show you how much I missed you?”

“What if I do?”

“Then I will do anything you ask,” you guaranteed, “I would get on my knees right now, daddy. I would let everyone watch me choke on your cock, let them all watch you fuck my face.”

He nodded once. “I don’t think such a grand display is necessary. Especially given that I could just watch you fucking a toy last night, despite my clear instructions that you were not allowed to.”

Your face flushed. “You…were watching me?”

So, it had been a mutual decision to set up a camera in the bedroom. When he was gone and he could call, it just made phone sex easier. When he came home, that sex was always something else. You liked watching it from time to time. However, he was not supposed to be using it to make sure you weren’t breaking rules! That wasn’t fair, that was a major invasion of privacy.

“Yes, I was watching. I missed my baby girl, wanted to see her beautiful face, her stunning fucking body.”

“That’s not fair.”

“Were you going to lie to me?” he questioned. “If I came home and asked you if you had listened to me, what would you have said?”

You glared. “I guess we’ll never know.” You turned on your heels to return to Sam and Wanda, but he grabbed your arm and yanked you back to him.

“Daddy didn’t tell you that you could walk away.”

“Steve,” you warned.

He scoffed. “So, you messed up and now you’re going to be a brat with me?”

“We’re not doing this here.”

“No?” he feigned confusion, reaching for his phone. He tapped the screen a mere three times before turning it to you.

Right—you had stupidly let him talk you into shoving a vibrator in your pussy before you headed out. You’d thought that just meant he missed you incredibly. Clearly not. “Don’t,” you said.

He scoffed. “Baby, I know you didn’t just tell me what to do.”

You glanced back to make sure your friends were preoccupied. “I don’t want to do this tonight, okay? I’m tired and I missed you, you were gone for a long time and I just wanted you to come home so we could spend the night together and have fun. I didn’t think you were going to invade my privacy—”

“Invade your privacy?” he interjected. “You have no privacy, doll, because you’re mine. Normally, you’re fine with that. But you were misbehaving and you need to be punished, so now you suddenly want to pretend it’s a problem? Your dramatics won’t save you tonight.”

He knew you well. And you knew him, he wasn’t going to drop this game. If you said no for an entire year—which, just to be clear, you did not have the ability to do—he would just punish you that very second you finally said yes because he could hold a grudge like it was nothing. Better to get on with it, before he decided to just stop all sexual activity. “Fine. What first?”

“Would you have lied to me?”

“Technically, no.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Can’t wait to hear this one.”

“Well, you always know when I’m lying, so is it lying?”

“Yes, it is. Don’t say something to me if it’s not true.”

You finally moved closer, taking one of his hands in both of yours. He watched you carefully, ready to stop you if you made a single move he didn’t like. You turned his hand and kissed his palm several times. “I love you.”

He scoffed. “And I love you. That doesn’t mean I’m not spanking you until your ass is several different shades of red.”

You huffed. “Well, can we get it over with?”

“No,” he scoffed. “Definitely not.”

You wanted to roll your eyes, but you knew that would only provoke more of this nonsense.

He turned to the phone again.

“Steve, not in front of everyone—” your words cut off with a yelp before you pressed your hand flat over your lips, desperately trying to silence the sounds you were making. The toy lying against your skin, set just right thanks to the very tiny, tight panties he placed you in, abruptly began to vibrate at a speed you were not prepared for.

Steve caught your arm and kept you steady. “Don’t call me Steve again,” he directed. “Not tonight, doll.”

You only let your hand slip when you couldn’t handle it anymore and needed to speak, not when you had the confidence you wouldn’t humiliate yourself. “Daddy, please—”

“Already begging to come?” He turned it up and one of your legs buckled, he kept a hold on you, mistrusting your ability to stand on your own.

“No, no,” you blurted out. “Stop, please—”

“Apologize.”

You snorted, eyes widening when you realized what you had just done. “I’m—”

And once more, the speed picked up. You grabbed the edge of the table for balance even though you knew he wouldn’t let you fall. You shot him a desperate look and he finally took pity on you, turning off the vibrator all together.

“You’re in for a rough night,” he informed you.

You pretended that was the last thing you wanted to hear, you pretended that you were upset, annoyed, exhausted. That was so far from reality. It had been a while since he went all out to punish you, you almost forgot how much you liked it. But standing there, hoping no one knew what was going on, you were quickly reminded.

Only, when you got home, you didn’t get your rough night. Well, not the one you wanted but his satisfied smirk told you this was what he had always meant. He watched you undress and remove your makeup, then he spent a cruel amount of time just kissing you everywhere, except the one place you needed him the most.

He tied your wrists and ankles to the bedpost. You were sure he was going to fuck you, make you so stupid and obedient that a sincere apology would just fall from your lips. You were wrong.

Instead, Steve elected to get himself off several times and cover you with his cum. You weren’t complaining about that, you loved feeling it on your skin. Your issue was when he untied you and told you to get in the shower before you both turned in for the night. He didn’t even get in with you.

While you were in the bathroom, he took the liberty of picking out what you were going to wear. You couldn’t be much of a tease in a simple oversized t-shirt—which wasn’t his—and leggings. You kept your back to him the entire night, but he circled his arm around you and held you like he was scared he was going to lose you, regardless of your clear anger.

It didn’t end there. When you woke up, he kissed you. It was the kind of kiss that always prefaced something, it was the kind of kiss he always gave you when he came home from a mission—a message of ‘I missed you’.

But as you were pushing on his stomach to get him on his back, he pulled away. He explained to you that he was still upset that you disobeyed him. He gave you the option, he could spank you now and fuck you later, or he would wait until you apologized and meant it.

It was an awful way to wake up, added to the frustration of the night before, your response was rude and vulgar. He merely smirked, kissed your forehead, and slipped out of bed.

Training shirtless in December. Getting way too close whenever he needed to walk by you or around you. Constantly touching you or doing things with his hands when he knew you were watching because he knew you were addicted to his fucking hands. He was shameless. And mean. And you were limited on options because you needed to have sex with this man! But you also wanted to keep your pride intact.

It was like this for several days and just one night less. He would torture you in front of everyone because he knew you weren’t going to act out. Then, the nights were strict. He made you shower alone, made you dress yourself in bland, old clothing, and then it was nothing but actual sleep.

The night it all changed was another night out, only it was a Stark party and that meant the whole gang was going. He couldn’t tell you what to wear if you avoided him all day, so you did. You spent all your time with Wanda and Nat. It was an obscenely early breakfast, then shopping, then brunch because alcohol was needed, and more shopping, up until the team was getting ready for another—undoubtedly—eventful outing.

In your skin-tight, tiny pink dress, Steve was slipping. You could see it in the way he looked at you, in the way his hands were fisted at his sides, his set jaw, and his squared shoulders. Control was fleeting and you were nothing short of smug, which only made him more determined to fight back.

He drove you to Tony’s because you both were trying to appear normal to everyone else. They always made their jokes about the games you two played, so discretion was a must. The aspect of getting caught and not just blatantly being shameless also played a role behind your secrecy.

He inquired about your day because he wanted you to admit what you did. Instead, you were almost wholly honest, you told him that you wanted to spend time with the girls. He didn’t buy it, but he wasn’t going to call you out, not while you were alone. You took advantage of his silence and divulged secrets told to you that you probably shouldn’t have—but this was Steve, he would never tell a soul.

“Wanda says Vision is terrible at going down on her.”

He shot you a look. “Can you not tell me these things about my teammates?”

“Will you help him, baby?”

His eyes went comically wide. “What?”

“You’re just so good at it.”

“You’re insane.”

You sighed. “Fine, just let Wanda suffer.

“I will.”

He was clearly uncomfortable, and you were enjoying it immensely. “Nat says Bucky is really, really good.”

He sighed. “I didn’t want to know that.”

“But I’m sure no one is better than you…remember the last time you ate me out?”

He scoffed. “Pretty sure we were going to a Stark party…it’s been too long.”

“I don’t mind,” you claimed. “I’m always the one that is too impatient to let you, anyway.”

“I always have to tie you up,” he muttered almost more to himself. “But if you were trying to get on my good side…”

“What?”

He jerked the steering wheel right and sped into a parking lot.

“Steve, what are you doing?”

He turned off the car and looked at you. “If you behave now, you might get a reward tonight.”

“Steve, we’re going to be late. The team gets mad when we’re late.”

He didn’t look worried at all. He began angling your body toward him, hands sliding down your sides until he reached your hips. He pulled you closer to the edge of the seat and you took the cue to lean against the door. “Open your legs for me.”

You curled on leg around the side of the seat and pressed the opposite out as far as you could. This was not a good idea, but when were you ever going to say no to him telling you to open your legs? Most days, they just fell open for him.

He ran his hands back up your thighs to move the dress out of his way, smirking as you shivered.

You didn’t care anymore, about anything. You couldn’t stop staring at his lips, completely willing to forget all the shit he had put you through the past few days. His mouth could make you do anything, all he ever had to do was ask.

He started by kissing your thighs because he wanted you to snap at him, to tell him to hurry up. You wouldn’t—screw the team. You would just have to bring up all the times they were late.

His eyes flit up to you several times make sure he had you absolutely wrecked with all his teasing. Your thighs were shaking, tired from how you were using them, but you always knew that he made it worthwhile.

When he finally pressed just the gentlest kiss to your pussy, you shuddered. “Daddy,” you whined. “Please eat my pussy.”

He hummed as if he was contemplating.

“Please, daddy,” you whined. “Please, it’s been so long. I miss it.”

“You don’t prefer the beard?” he challenged knowingly. The beard didn’t always make sense for his cover, sometimes he had to get rid of it. You never let him do so without fucking you just one last time—rough, fast, dirty.

“No,” you denied. “I do not prefer it.”

He arched an eyebrow, ending all those small kisses he was scattering along your skin. “Really?”

“I prefer you, Steve Rogers. Beard, no beard. Long hair, short hair. I don’t care what you look like. I just know, every second of every day, I want you to be fucking me.”

He hummed, tried to pretend it didn’t matter. But it did, because Steve needed a partner that needed him. Not in that gross, misogynistic way most men were guilty of. He needed a partner that sometimes couldn’t think straight, that sometimes couldn’t complete the simple task of living until he was inside them. “Good answer.”

You smiled. “I’m aware.” You fit those requirements well. Yes, you were good and wanted to please him. However, you were also greedy and demanding and sometimes, you threw fits and tantrums, sometimes, you refused to do what you needed to do until he made you come. You felt zero shame about wanting and needing him and you knew the simple fact of desiring him specifically always got him off.

“You really are my good girl,” he feigned realization, as if you hadn’t made it abundantly clear a million times over.

“Yes, I am.”

“And my good girl wants her pussy eaten?”

“Yes, I do.”

He kissed his way up your thigh again and finally, turned to your cunt. He kissed you several more times as you squirmed, then licked up slowly as his eyes were locked on yours.

You shuddered. “Daddy, that feels so good.”

“If you weren’t being such a good girl, I would spank you for not wearing underwear.”

You smiled.

He repeated that same touch several times, looking more and more pleased every sound you made, every jerk of your hips. It was all slow, all calculated movement designed to pleasure you just enough, but not enough. He just wanted to taste you and tease you, and you didn’t mind any of it. This is the most time Steve has spent on you in a while, you were just enjoying his attention.

You were 40 minutes late, messed up hair, flushed cheeks, shaky legs because he didn’t let you come—and everyone knew exactly what it was that had made you late, exactly what you had prioritized over them.

You were insane. You had been driven to that point by Steve Rogers, Captain America—he was a cruel man not that selfless hero everyone got to see. He’d taken you so close to that edge so many times, promised if you were patient that he would make it all up to you.

When he finally lifted your hips and buried his face between your thighs, you were sure your finish was coming. He sucked on your clit mercilessly, tongue swiping out a few times to gather the arousal leaking down your pussy. When you let him know you were close, he set you down on the seat again and told you to put your seatbelt back on.

He had done this before but maybe it was all that time that he had been gone. Maybe it was that his face was wet, his lips redder and fuller than usual, and that he simply smirked and wiped the back of his hand over his skin. It was just different. He was not going to get away with it.

You didn’t say a word for the rest of the drive. Even though he was cooing at you the entire time about how you were his doll and you were beautiful, and he claimed to love you so much. He kept touching your hair and your arm, but you wouldn’t budge.

When Bucky threw you a pitiful look, the whole plan just sort of fell into place. You couldn’t really be blamed, right? He couldn’t consider it your fault—no, at this point, he had to know that anything you did in response to his disproportionate punishment was all on him. He left you alone, didn’t fuck you, didn’t let you come—flirting with Bucky was well within your rights.

It started simple. Bucky was trying to warm up to his metal arm more—the next step in his therapy—and you liked helping. This wasn’t that, necessarily, but you could say you were killing two birds with one stone. You simply walked right up to him and draped his arm around your shoulders. You knew your boyfriend wouldn’t like it because that was what you did to him, it was one of the many ways you liked asking him for attention without using words.

Steve eyed you for nothing more than a second, and neither of you acknowledged it any further, but you knew it bothered him. You’d been given quite a powerful gift one night when Steve had you pressed to the wall, chest to your back, hand to your throat as he fucked you from behind. He had admitted that he was being so complicated—that was a week of hell, one you always shuddered thinking about because you couldn’t walk straight a few days after—because he didn’t like how he felt whenever you would just disappear with Bucky. He promised he wasn’t accusing either of you of anything, it just reminded him of how things used to be with his best friend. You didn’t like flirting with Bucky, but after what Steve had done, it was deserved.

Apparently, he wasn’t too angry since he was on you as soon as you and Bucky separated. He held you as close as possible until he talked you into going outside. Stark parties were always crowded and loud and it wasn’t rare that people would be nearly glued to the side of the building and one another, practically having sex with their clothes on. But it was rare that you and Steve were some of those people.

Yet, he was not hesitant. He led you outside, his fingers linked between yours. As soon as he could, he turned back to you and caged you against the building with his forearms on either side of your head.

He made no further moves, he just watched you. Your skin was itching with desire, but you wouldn’t let him know that. “Did you want something, daddy?”

He smirked a little, shaking his head. “Not much. I just wanted you to know that I’m aware you’ve been good.”

You smiled unintentionally, but it felt nice that he knew you were being good, knew that you wanted something very specific. Him, completely to yourself, just one night. You deserved it.

He leaned down and you tilted your head back to meet his kiss. “Well,” his lips brushed over yours, “that was until you decided to be a brat with Bucky.”

You pulled back, pouting at him.

He arched an eyebrow, challenging you to protest.

“Well, if you’re not going to touch me—”

“I was going to reward you for your patience. Good thing I decided to wait.”

“Are you kidding? I waited for you to come back and then your stupid mission got extended by three days—three, so I broke on the last night. Big deal. Then you get here and you don’t fuck me, and don’t even get me started on the shit you just pulled. I wanted attention and affection and Bucky seemed willing to provide.”

One of his hands wrapped around your throat, his thumb massaging over your pulse point. “So, your grand solution, if I’m not giving you what you want, is to run to Bucky?”

“What if I say yes?”

He glanced around before tightening his hand and looking down at you. “If you say yes, then I’m going to punish you. I’m going to take you to the side of this building, in the alley, get you on your knees, and make you remind me how much you love me. So, baby doll, what’s your answer?”

It was as if he thought you wouldn’t enjoy every second of that. “My answer is yes,” you claimed. “If you’re not giving me attention, I’ll get it from Bucky.”

He took another quick look around before dragging you into the alley just like he said he was going to. Before you could say a word, he was tearing off his jacket to toss onto the floor. He pressed you down onto it by your shoulders, hands then flying to his pants.

By the time you were comfortably settled, hands safely on his thighs, Steve had his cock out for you. Eyes on his, you opened your mouth and swallowed as much of him as you could, slowly because you needed some type of upper hand.

He didn’t let you keep it for long, however. His hand settled at the back of your head and he began fucking your throat like someone who wasn’t just pretending to be angry. Like someone who wasn’t just being the most extra fucking person because he had wanted this the very second that he’d returned home.

You knew better, you always did. He wasn’t mad, you weren’t sincerely flirting with Bucky, you wouldn’t do it again, but he wouldn’t mind if you did—given that you didn’t cross any lines. It was a fun game, but it was time to end this. All this fighting over him watching you, the power struggle, it was done. You just wanted this man to fuck you. You would surrender and you wouldn’t mind it one bit when he had you in bed later that night.

It had to be fast, he couldn’t let you tease. There were people around, people who would undoubtedly gravitate toward the alley. It was pure luck that it was empty at all, but he wasn’t going to waste time being grateful. He was rough sliding in and out of your throat, these quiet grunts just barely audible through all your gagging and the noise of the outside, the people, the cars.

By the time he finished, your throat was sore, tears began running down your cheeks all the way to your neck, drool was starting to slip from your lips. You were a mess, on your knees in an alley, all for Captain fucking America. You never dreamed of being this cool when you were younger, but sometimes things just worked out.

He had leaned onto the brick wall behind you with his forearm, eyes slammed shut, mouth hanging open as he caught his breath.

You waited patiently, despite your declining oxygen and your growing desperation for it. You swallowed when you could, tried breathing through your nose calmly, you didn’t want to have to tell him to pull out. You wanted to keep him for as long as he wanted you to, you wanted him to tell you that you were good with those heart eyes that he always got when you sucked his cock.

He began running his fingers down your hair. “Clean me up, baby.”

You did so as well as you could, but he barely gave you sufficient time before he was pulling you onto your feet.

He leaned in almost immediately to reach down, under your skirt to slide your panties down your legs. You lifted your feet when he needed you to, but mostly, just stupidly stood there. He wasn’t going to fuck you out here, was he? He was a risk-taker, you’d give him that, but an actual gambler? Not quite on that level yet.

He stood, pressing the lace to your chin to dry your face of spit and tears. He was so soft about it, so different than how he had been just moments ago. You watched his face the entire time, blushing terribly at how intently he was staring at you.

“Open your mouth, sweetheart.”

You did so, fully expecting him to kiss you. Instead, he shoved your panties between your lips and was turning away before you could blink. He tucked himself back into his pants with such ease, ease that only came from having super-hearing and knowing for sure that he wasn’t going to be caught.

So, yeah. Long story short, you pushed Steve too far and now he was mad. More than the average amount. Honestly, did he expect you not to retaliate? After he left you alone in the alley without calling you his good girl? If he didn’t see it coming, then he didn’t know you as well as you thought he did.

But he did know you enough. His rough hands had been moving over your ass for the better part of an hour. He’d positioned you in the bedroom so you could see the clock, he wanted you to see that he intended to take him time. He hadn’t spanked you yet and you were just about shaking in anticipation, you knew he had to feel how wet you were.

Yet, he didn’t say a word. He didn’t let you either, any attempt was cut off by some disapproving noise and you were too scared to push him more. Not after what you did…

But you were also impatient. You weren’t trying to be disobedient or argumentative, but you had to communicate with him. He was driving you insane, you weren’t sure you could do this much longer. You cleared your throat a bit. “Daddy—”

“Baby girl, one more time and daddy will have to gag you.”

You immediately shut up. You didn’t want to be gagged. You noticed that when you were less vocal, he was less vocal, and at the end of it all, what was the point of all the theatrics if he wasn’t going to praise you?

He leaned down and kissed the top of your head.

You just wanted to hear it. That you were good, that he was proud of you. Instead, without warning, his hand struck one side of your ass and you were so surprised that you yelped.

Your hands rushed to your mouth as you turned back over your shoulder slightly to eye him. You saw him smirk, this was obviously what he wanted, but then he tsked at you. “I’m sorry, daddy, I was just surprised. I’ll be quiet, I swear.”

He let his palm rub over the red mark across your skin. He hummed, feigning thought. “I don’t know, doll.” His opposite hand came up to grab your jaw, turning your attention forward again.

You were opposed to the gag, but if he wanted to choke you… You brought both your hands up to his forearm and pressed against it until his hand slid down a bit, settling confidently to your throat.

He scoffed. “Want me to choke you?”

You nodded.

“You can speak.”

“Please, daddy,” you begged.

“After all the misbehaving? Do you honestly think you deserve it?”

“Yes.”

He snorted. “Okay.” His hand wrapped around your neck, so suddenly that the surprised noise you made got caught in your throat. The next time he smacked you, your moan was choked, barely audible.

You were immediately relieved. You weren’t going to have to try to be quiet. He always treated that part like a game, if he told you to be quiet, he would then do whatever he could to make you get loud.

He was hitting harder than usual, hard enough that the only thing keeping you draped over his lap was his hand in front of you that was wound around you. You didn’t mind at all, you always wanted him to let go a little. But of course, he was Steve, and he couldn’t stop being overprotective if his life depended on it.

That he wasn’t more concerned with checking in on you was testament to how angry you’d made him. The thing with Bucky was clearly a game, Steve knew you were just making some cheap shots to get his attention. Taking you outside and getting you to suck him off was just him indulging you.

This was not that. You were being punished and his greatest source of irritation seemed to be that you were completely unapologetic. Also, there was the pride aspect, that you had done this in front of the team. If he couldn’t keep you in check, what kind of a leader was he?

But he most certainly couldn’t control you, not unless you wanted to let him. Mostly, he seemed to like that, seemed to like the challenge, the power struggles, the attitude. However, tonight, when you were dancing with Wanda, he seemed a bit…opposed. Wanda herself had been mad at Steve because of a little disagreement they had during their last mission. She was playing to win and if your sore aching ass was any indication, she had.

You always danced with Wanda, you danced with all your friends. But see, Wanda could read minds and that didn’t always produce the best scenarios. She knew you were desperate for an upper hand and she was just crazy enough to help you get it. It started fun like it always did when the girls were free of the boys, but then her hands were on your hips. Yet, you were fine, you knew Steve wouldn’t like it, but oh well.

Then, she spun you around, your back to her chest, and you were facing Steve. And well, she let her hands wander. You had been drinking a little, it was thrilling watching Steve watch you, knowing that he was going to make tonight hell for you.

He was beautiful, sat there, contemplating, strategizing, waiting with the restraint of a god. This was one of those moments when he just couldn’t turn off Captain America, when one was blending into the other. You never minded that. You loved Steve first, of course, but Captain America was just right after that.

You were excited when he calmly got onto the floor almost an hour later and told you it was time to go. You had to bite your tongue to stop the giggles and the words you desperately wanted to say as he took your hand and led you outside. Your body was humming with energy as he drove you back to the compound, hand firmly on your thigh.

He told you he could smell you, your pussy, how terribly you wanted him. He carried you to his room, knowing that your legs were weak and that if given the option, you’d beg him to fuck you in the hall. It was the start of your submission, you both loved it when he handled you like it was nothing.

By the time he yanked your panties down, you were already crying and shaking, your entire body throbbing for a release. Some of your tears had rolled down your cheeks and onto his thigh, and he could feel your knees buckling despite you trying to stand for him. He always ordered you to stay on your feet no matter how useless it was, no matter that even in heels, draped over his huge body, your feet barely touched the ground.

He stopped spanking you only to grab one of your hands from his forearm, dragging it down. “Touch your clit.”

It was nothing short of awkward positioning. You had to reach under his thigh and back up to where your cunt was. You had to angle your ass up just a little to have access, and he took that to mean that you wanted him to smack you harder.

He leaned down, kissing your head. “You’re okay?” He let your neck go just a little, a sign he wanted you to use words.

You nodded, clearing your throat. “Yes, daddy.”

“Don’t stop touching your clit until I tell you. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“And you better not come.”

“Okay.”

“If you do either of these things, I will tie you up and spank you for the rest of the night. I won’t fuck you, I won’t make you come.”

You nodded again. “Okay.”

You were slow about it, worried that you might work yourself up too quickly. He only just started with this, he wasn’t going to let it go for at least 30 minutes. He smacked you the entire time. It was heavy and noisy, and never failed to make your hips jolt so much that your clit was constantly moving out of reach before you panicked and set yourself back in the correct place.

“Rub your clit faster, doll.”

“Daddy—”

He reached down to take your hand, pressed firmly on your clit, and spoke over the moan that fell from your open mouth. “Do it like that, don’t make me tell you again.”

Even when he moved his hand, you continued. Your moans were strangled but loud enough for him. “Daddy, I’ll come like this.”

“Don’t,” was all he said and followed with another strike across your ass.

“Daddy, please, I’m going to come.” Your thighs were already shaking, that pressure in your lower body was building, threatening to bloom into a numbing orgasm. “Daddy, I can’t do this.”

“Yes, you can.” Another smack. “Aren’t you my good girl?” And another. “Don’t you wanna make daddy proud?” Another.

“Yes, daddy, but it feels too good,” you blurted out.

“My decision has been made.” He hit you twice more before you started to panic.

“Daddy, I’m sorry,” you whined. “I’m really sorry, please let me stop!”

He settled one hand over your ass cheek and removed his hand from your neck to take your hand away from your pussy. “Baby, make it a good apology or we will start all over.”

You pulled your joined hands up and started kissing his knuckles. “I’m sorry, daddy, I promise I am.”

“For what?” he asked slowly. “Say all of it.”

“For flirting with Bucky.”

He smacked you again and you hissed. “How did you flirt with Bucky?”

“I let him touch me.”

Once more. “And why is that wrong?”

You waited until your skin stopped stinging before you spoke. “Because only you should be touching me.”

He hummed and his hand came down again. “Go on.”

“And for dancing with Wanda.”

“You wanted to make daddy mad, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” you admitted.

“Because you wanted to be spanked,” he accused.

You nodded. “Yes.”

“How’s that working out for you, doll?”

“It was fun for a while,” you admitted.

He snorted. “You’re a god damn brat.”

You kissed his hand again. “Your brat?”

He rolled his eyes, but you could see he was trying to fight a smile. “Yeah, mine. No one else should touch you, no one else should be dancing with you.” He finally pulled you up, quickly setting you so that you straddled him. He touched your face with both hands, looking over you carefully.

Your hands went to his pants and you began moving them out of the way.

He lifted an eyebrow at you. “I know you’re not doing that without permission.”

Biting your lip, you shrugged and pressed your palm against his cock through the pants.

He spanked you again and you crashed into him. Your knees slipped from the mattress and you frantically caught onto his shoulders. He gave you no time to recover, instead, rolled over so you were under him. “You know what I want to hear, doll.”

You did know. As much as you wanted him to praise you, he wanted you to tell him you loved him. But, again, you truly were a brat and sometimes decided to withhold such an admission. “I love you, daddy.”

“I love you, too.”

You brought a hand up to his face. “Are you gonna fuck me, daddy?”

“I’m gonna ruin you, baby doll,” he corrected. “First, I’m gonna eat your pussy and let you come. Then, I’m gonna fuck your pussy until I’m not hard anymore. Then I’m gonna fuck your mouth until I’m ready to fuck your ass.”

You would place money on the absurd idea that he’d somehow gotten a degree in teasing. Pathetically, you clutched at his shirt. “Please?”

He smirked. “Anything you want, baby girl.”

You yanked the hem up his back and he assisted you in taking it off. You kissed him hungrily, open-mouthed, moaning, yanking on his lip with both of yours.

He wasted no time, spared no warning, offered no preparation time. Abruptly, two of his thick fingers were inside your pussy and you were crying out, throwing your head back, body arching up closer to his. He started kissing your face, down the faint tear tracks that resulted from the prior spanking.

Again, he ordered against your skin, “say it again.”

“I love you,” you blurted out, hips rolling up to get him in further. “Daddy, I love you so fucking much.”

As his fingers curled, he kissed down your face, your neck, all the way down to one of your breasts. “Touch the other,” he directed, and didn’t close his mouth around your nipple until your hand had cupped your neglected breast.

He sucked hard, pressed his fingers hard, held you down with his hips hard. Everything about him was hard and rough and determined. He took you there fast, to that place where your body was shaking, these whiny, small noises couldn’t stop pouring out of you if your life depended on it, your hips jerking, your pussy clenching, stars behind your god damn eyes.

“I’m close, daddy. Can I come?”

He bit into your skin instead of answering, perfect teeth surrounding your nipple, a fucking threat. Did he actually think you didn’t want him to dig his teeth into you?

Your second hand came up to the back of his head where you fisted his hair and pressed him down more. “Harder, daddy, harder.”

He let his teeth pinch you just a tad more, concern clear in his actions.

“Harder,” you repeated.

Again, he gave you what you asked for, and pressed a third finger inside you. It was a delicious, disorienting, blissful stretch that you had to spread your legs to try to take.

“Harder,” you ordered, tone sharp, maybe a little condescending.

His fingers began pounding into you, wet noises echoing from your pussy. Finally, you were sure his teeth had pierced your skin.

You screamed so loud you were sure the entire floor heard you—distantly, you spared thought to who was going to give you a rough time at breakfast. Your orgasm followed almost instantly, and Steve fucked his fingers into you until you were mewling and brushing your fingers through his hair. You couldn’t say much at the moment but that little gesture never failed to stroke that unspoken part of Steve—which you had always known about—that also liked praise.

He turned up to you and you saw him lick his lips, maybe you’d seen a flash of red, maybe you’d just imagined it. Your breast stung, you thought you might have felt something drip down your skin… He pulled you up with him, hand on your arm, his other hand touching your lips, giving you a little taste of what your pussy had left behind on his fingers.

Before you could say a word, Steve was getting you on your knees and pushing you toward the headboard. You were confused by it but since you were still reeling from your last orgasm, you decided to trust him. He kept you facing away from him and you didn’t understand why until your wrists were being tied to the headboard. He took your hips and yanked you back and it was then you thought maybe you knew what he was doing. Your ankles were next, which was a long process given that you were so far away from the next spot on the bed that could hold a rope.

You were uncomfortably angled, body pulled tight. It was his favorite way to eat you out, you were completely exposed to him, unable to pull yourself away if he was overstimulating you. How he got back under you is another part of this that you were unclear on, anticipation now clouding your ability to logical thoughts.

His hands slid up your thighs, over your ass, clasped around your waist and then he pulled you down almost violently, clearly unconcerned about the way that pulled at both your arms and legs. You didn’t mind much either.

Once more, he didn’t bother with any of that elaborate shit. You weren’t built up, you weren’t led to an orgasm. He ate your pussy like it was the only thing he knew how to do. He alternated between running his tongue through you—prodding your entrance just slightly, then over your clit, back down and the same, over and over—to sucking your clit between his lips, moaning, sighing, making all of these appreciative noises that only added to all the sensations.

His fingers dug into your skin, your ribs painfully, your limbs were aching, but you knew it didn’t matter. Even if you told him all of this, even if you could make yourself care—as if you could focus on anything but his mouth—he wasn’t going to stop until he was satisfied.

Your first finish was slow, a somewhat drawn-out process that he worked to keep you on the edge of for just a few moments. He wasn’t teasing, necessarily, but he needed to remind you, in this state of hazy pleasure, that your body was wholly his. You squeezed your eyes shut, yanked on the ropes because that was the only thing you could do, and once again, reminded him that you loved him.

The second orgasm felt nearly immediately after—though, time distantly existed to someone as satisfied as you. You were trying to relax, worried you would spend yourself before you got fucked. He didn’t stop, he didn’t slow, if anything, he was faster, more skilled. He sucked at your skin roughly, a demand because he was getting impatient.

You were a whimpering, crying mess, begging him in half sentences because you were unable to articulate fully what you wanted. Your pussy spasmed, clenching in desperate need to be filled as he focused solely on your clit. You screamed things that you knew he would be smug about for days to come, how good you felt, how badly you needed only him, how much you wanted to be on his cock because he had the best cock in the world.

Prior to you, Steve thought he didn’t need to hear such biased things from a lover. But since he couldn’t get drunk, this was basically the only drug he could indulge in and get something out of.

This was around the time you started to worry, because again, you were offered no recovery time. He flicked his tongue over your clit regardless of your pleas for a break, regardless of how desperately you pulled on the ropes, regardless of the tears rolling down your cheeks. It was too much, you couldn’t come again.

He brought his hand up and spread your cunt, tongue continuing back and forth over that sensitive spot. You sobbed, utterly broken, overwhelmed, consumed, and insisted that you couldn’t give him another one. He stopped licking you only to say, “you can, and you will,” before diving right back in.

He must have known that this was it, this was when you needed your reprieve. You finished and he made sure not a drop of you went to waste, but then he was kissing around your thighs, you could feel that his cheeks and jaw were wet and there was something deep inside you that loved that his face was covered in you—maybe you could go a couple more rounds.

He tore the ropes off, uncaring of what happened to the bed or anything else—though, the way the post creaked made you worry. He just wanted to get you loose quickly and as soon as you were free, he was laying you down and kissing you wherever he could reach, mainly your chest and one of your arms.

When his lips were on yours, you remembered how badly you had wanted him inside you. It didn’t matter that you could barely move, you insisted on pushing his jeans down. “Daddy, please?”

He helped you because he doubted your ability to do so on your own, but he made the mental note to let you undress him before he ate you out next time. He loved when you undressed him, how your fingers would glide down his skin so softly, like he was something delicate or breakable. Sometimes, it made him forget who and what he was.

Though you were soaking wet, somewhat numb from all that overstimulation, he was hard enough that it hurt. His cock pressed into you carefully, inch by inch, his eyes on your face the whole time. He loved the flush on your cheeks, that hazy gleam in your eye, your swollen, parted lips—you looked so wrecked.

You weakly hooked a leg around his ass, hands following to grasp at his shoulders. “Daddy, I feel like I’ve needed you inside me for a fucking year.” And now he was there, and it made no sense how complete you felt, how sated, how at-home.

He kissed your lips first, a clear apology, then he kissed all around your face until you couldn’t stop smiling. “I’ll make it up to you,” he assured. “I’m gonna pound your beautiful little pussy until I know you can’t take it anymore.”

Sometimes, fucking so wildly and creatively was at the cost of simple intimacy. As he picked up this steady pace, this nice roll of his hips that was deep enough to make you cry out and forceful enough that his skin slapped noisily against yours, your eyes sought his out. He set his hand to your cheek, a nonverbal order to keep looking at him. His eyes always seemed like an ocean to you, so great, so dangerous, so mysterious. You realized he hadn’t spoken about his last mission, you were beginning to wonder if there was a bigger reason for all these games. Maybe this was his way of sneakily getting you here without having to talk about it—he never liked you to worry.

You finished and it felt like he was finally home, despite him having been there for several days. You shuddering beneath him, tightening around him to the point of being painful just grounded him like nothing else could, reminded him that he was human.

His hips stilled immediately and before you could say a word, his lips were on yours. He was smart, anyone who ever claimed Steve wasn’t alarmingly intelligent was dead wrong. He was a strategist above all else, that also applied in bed. He wanted you to come down fast before he started up again, he wanted you loose and weak because you were less likely to make him come that way. And he had such grand plans for the rest of the night, it was written all over his face, meaning he was edging himself.

There were few things better than when Steve did this. He always knew how to start slow for himself, not gentle, not boring, just simply not enough. With time, he fucked you harder, he grabbed you like you were little more than a toy given to him simply for his pleasure, the noises he made were animalistic, the things he would say… You just had to last that long, and it was always a mystery if you would, if he would take it easy on you or not.

Usually, he didn’t care to be so considerate.

He settled his weight on one of his forearms as he pulled away from the kiss. His opposite hand slid down your body and to your sensitive cunt.

“Daddy,” you whimpered. Nope, he most certainly was not going easy on you tonight.

He didn’t start fucking you again. Instead, he rubbed firm, quick circles over your clit until you were shaking and screaming and crying and squeezing his shoulders in your hands.

While you were coming, he brought his hand over your mouth and nose. You did your best to look up at him, but he kept his fingers on your clit and you could barely think straight, let alone see straight.

“Hear that?” That was when he started thrusting. “Hear how wet your pussy is? It’s been that wet all night, you’ve been so desperate for my cock all night. When you were flirting with Bucky, when you were dancing with Wanda. And they both knew it. Bucky can smell you, too, and I’m sure Wanda was reading your thoughts.”

Both of those suggestions were mortifying. It wasn’t normal how weak and pathetic you got over Steve’s cock. Thinking that the team knew that, that Wanda was listening to some of your thoughts, you wouldn’t be able to look them in the eye for at least the next week.

He kept his hand over you, preventing you from breathing because he knew it would make your next orgasm better. He felt a sinful amount of pride when your eyes began crossing, when your hips started to jerk, when you started digging your nails into his skin. You were so fucked out you didn’t care what you looked like or sounded like, and that was what turned him on like nothing else after long nights like these.

You started shoving his arm as you were coming down, realizing once more the importance of oxygen. He waited, kept his hold over you, eyes locked on yours, until your eyes filled with more tears and your skin turned just a little red. When he let you go, your chest heaved as you greedily took in air. And he never once stopped driving his cock in and out of you, reveling in the sounds.

“Daddy—”

He scoffed, rolling over effortlessly so you were on top. “Come on, sweetheart, I know you’re not trying to tap out right now.” His hand spread over your back, holding you down flat. His voice was surprisingly steady considering his erratic thrusts. “Not only would I not let you, but you know you’re tougher than that.”

Your cheek was pressed to his chest, the loudest sound you could hear was his pounding heart. You had your hands somewhere on his body, all you could feel was skin and muscle and heat. His hands slid down to your ass where he held you in place and fucked you harder than he usually liked to. Screams tore from your throat along with these small mewls when you were almost choking on air because you could barely remember how to breathe.

“You love me, baby doll?”

“Yes,” you rasped. “Yes, daddy, I love you.”

“You gonna be a good girl and let daddy use you all night?”

“Yes.” That was a big promise you weren’t sure you were going to be able to keep but your desire to make him proud sometimes beat out logic.

“Sit up,” he directed but moved you himself. He placed your hands on his chest but kept a good hold of your shoulders. “You know what I want.”

And for some reason, your hips, despite all the screaming your muscles were doing, started to roll.

He let out a pleased sigh, eyes roaming over your body. His hands weren’t tight, they were just there if he needed to catch you, but this was all you. This was his baby, riding his cock because you were such a good girl.

This had to be adrenaline, there was no other explanation for why you were able to move on your own. From this position, you could feel how wet and sticky you’d gotten his thighs—how many times had he made you come? You weren’t sure anymore.

As you drew yourself closer to an orgasm, now wildly bouncing on his cock, screaming, gasping, sobbing, you pressed your nails down into his pecs as sharply as you could.

He watched your breasts move with you, smugly admiring the bruised and broken skin around your nipple. His heart swelled when he felt you trying to mark him up, too. You made him wish that he didn’t heal so fast sometimes, if only so he could be covered in you as much as you were covered in him.

He caught your hip in one hand when you were getting him too close. He dragged you down until you were flat on his lap, struggling to sit on the entire length of his cock. His other hand went to your clit again and you threw your head back and moaned shamelessly. He flicked his thumb over you until you were shaking, your knees digging into his sides, your chest heaving, your arms buckling.

He let you come down this time but not because he was feeling nice. He’d been so lost in you that he had let himself get just a little too far. But that didn’t stop you from being a fucking tease, he suspected nothing in this world could. You were sitting there, pussy occasionally clenching around his cock, your hands kneading your breasts and pinching your nipples.

His hand tightened on you when your shaky fingers touched the bite he’d left behind. You hissed a little, glancing down to assess the damage. He was sick for biting you like that, but you were sick for looking so god damn happy about it.

Your eyes flit up to him, catching him looking just a little weak. His mouth snapped shut when he realized you were watching him. “Wanna give me another one, daddy?”

Scoffing, he sat up, situating himself onto his legs so you could sit on his thighs. His arms slid around your back and he pulled you up until you were a head or so taller than him. With your eyes locked, he sucked your nipple between his lips.

“Fuck, daddy,” you whispered.

He hummed lightly, teeth just barely pressing down.

“Shit,” you muttered, almost more to yourself. You always liked feeling it, but he’d never taken the time to let you watch him do it.

He started sucking, taking more of your breast in his mouth until he’d decided where he wanted to let his teeth cut into your skin. He did it slow, sinking them in carefully and keeping his gaze on you the whole time. You were shaking again and he could feel your cunt leaking onto his lap. He wasn’t sure he’d ever gotten you this wet before.

Your eyes filled with new tears when he finally broke your skin. You bit your lip to keep from making a noise too big, but it was an agonized cry that made him pause for just a moment. But then you squeezed your pussy around him and his hand came down on your ass loudly, you weren’t sure what scared you more the sudden sound or the force behind it.

He pulled his mouth off and admired his work for a second before turning up to you. “You want to be a fucking brat after I’m making you act like this?”

You scoffed shakily. “And how are you making me act, daddy?”

Instead of answering that, he asserted, “I’ve never seen someone so desperate to have every hole fucked this hard. I’m sure most people haven’t.”

You arched an eyebrow at him.

“Maybe I should fuck you in front of the team, hmm?”

That idea probably didn’t put you off as much as he thought it would. Although, calling him daddy, begging for his cock and his cum, crying because he won’t let you finish—thinking of other people watching you submit like that was a little embarrassing.

“How about just Wanda and Vision?” you suggested.

He snorted. “Really?”

“He can watch you eat my pussy, you can show him how to do it.”

He hummed, pretending that he didn’t care.

But he should have stopped you because you were about to cross the line with him. After all, it was one of your favorite hobbies. “But before we get Wanda’s hopes up, maybe he could practice on me a few times.”

And when he gripped your hip tighter, you knew you’d hit the bullseye. He took his opposite hand and grabbed your jaw. “I’m only going to say this once, doll.”

You hummed, trying to hide how pleased with yourself you were.

“If you ever joke about someone else eating your pussy, I’ll fucking spank you until I see some blood.”

Though it was more than likely an empty threat—Steve didn’t have it in him to do that to you, even when you promised you would tell him if it was too much—his deep voice, his unrelenting grip on your jaw, his dark eyes all made you wetter.

“Understood?”

You tried not to smile but you failed, and continued to fail as you tried to hide it by nodding.

He scoffed sharply. “You’re so fucking spoiled.”

He grabbed a handful of hair at the back of your head, smirking when you startled. Before you could say a word, he was yanking you down until his cock had slipped out and you rolled off his lap. He didn’t much care where you landed, he just shoved your face into the bed.

Then he was on top of you, settling his body over yours but being careful not to set any weight on you. He was not gentle at all when he entered you again because this was the kind of fucking that wouldn’t stop until you were sweating, dripping with cum, crying, and blurting out nonsense that always seemed to placate him.

He kept your face pressed into the mattress as he railed into you. You screamed loudly because you could, because he wasn’t letting you do anything else, because it was the only way you could express to him how badly you wanted to finish, how badly you wanted him to finish. As you were coming, you only got louder, your throat was starting to ache, your heart was pounding, your head spinning—you couldn’t fucking breathe, not that you minded, and you were wasting the little oxygen you did have to let this man know he was fucking you just right.

He waited until your body was thrashing with aftershocks, until your voice had died down somewhat, and then lifted your head. Instead of letting you catch your breath, he leaned over and kissed you. It was a sloppy, open-mouthed kiss with a lot of tongue, both of you moaning as his hips continued to move.

“Daddy, are you gonna come?”

“You want me to?”

You nodded as well as you could with his hold on your hair. “Please, daddy.”

He hummed before shoving your face back down. He sat back then, free hand coming to the small of your back to keep you right there. With this new position, he had a lot more leverage and he took full advantage of that. You didn’t scream this time, you couldn’t. A sound had caught in your throat the second he slammed back into you harder than you could ever remember him doing so. It fucking hurt and you were aching, but you loved that harsh sting you felt in your pussy. You loved that he was the one who did it to you.

He collapsed back over you as he finished. His mouth took your shoulder, biting down to muffle the groans pouring from him as his body moved at a steady pace. You could feel his cum filling you, soon it would be dripping out, soon he would be moving again until he’d just about fucked it all out of you, and he’d want to do it again and again, until he wasn’t hard anymore.

Currently though, he was. He was buried deep inside you and it hurt to have him there while you were still tight from your last finish and the impending next one. It was a feeling you’d gotten used to, a feeling you’d grown to crave sometimes. That pain that was so uniquely Steve Rogers because no one else had that stamina or strength.

He sat up again, releasing his hold on your head so you could finally breathe. He let you collect yourself as he began positioning you over him. He spread your legs as wide as they could go, draping your thighs over his.

Was he ever going to give you a break?

His hands both curled around your waist, fingers pressing firmly down on that skin. He dragged you down further onto his cock and you threw your head back. He kept fucking you like this, just pushing and pulling your body and holding you so tight. He was merciless, forcing you to take as much of his cock as you could before you screamed. He loved hearing you scream. It fueled him on, so it was no surprise when he pinned you down to the mattress, hands painfully grasping at your skin, and began fucking you so roughly that the bed was rattling. You were shrieking and crying and pleading, and your hips were angling up so you could take him in deeper. All you wanted was your next orgasm.

When you got it, you felt much like a shattered vase. You could do nothing but lay there in pieces, panting, disoriented, struggling to keep a grip on reality. Through it all, he pounding into you, roughly handling your body to best get himself off.

You knew he was coming when he brought his forearms down on either side of you. It was a few more harsh snaps of his hips and then he was unmoving, and you were full of him. He wasn’t completely rested on you, but it was the only thing in that moment that could ground you.

You blindly, mindlessly reached for him. You curled your arm back, grabbing his hair to pull him closer. You didn’t want to kiss him, you just wanted him as close as he could possibly get. Regardless, he did kiss you until he felt like you had come down enough for him.

He slipped his cock out and you felt his cum following, dripping from your pussy. He climbed off the bed, standing at the very edge where he gestured you over. “Come here, baby doll.”

You weren’t sure how you made yourself crawl over to him. It was purely a miracle that your muscles worked. You were on your hands and knees when you took him into your mouth. His hand settled in your hair and he let his head fall back.

He wasn’t totally soft, but as soft as he was going to get while his thoughts about all the ways he wanted to fuck you persisted. He grabbed your hair and pulled you off, smiling a little when he saw you pouting. There were few things he liked seeing more than when you would get bratty just to suck him off. “Lay down on your back.”

You quickly obliged. He had never placed you in this position before and you loved when Steve took control of positions—it was never disappointing. He took your waist and pulled you to the edge of the bed until your head was dangling over. Immediately, you opened your mouth for him and he thrust back in.

You gagged noisily, your throat moving around him as you struggled to take him. He let you adjust on your own while his hands wandered your body. First, he grabbed your breasts, pinched your nipples until your back was arching and you were whimpering for more. He let them slide down until he could grab your thighs. He spread your legs as wide as they could go and watched your cunt pulsing and clenching, messy, sticky. And dipping with his cum.

“Keep your legs open for me,” was all he said before he leaned over and his tongue was sliding through your folds. You whined, muffled by his cock, utterly frustrated by how badly you wanted him to suck your clit. He pressed his hands down flat on your thighs to keep you pinned right where he wanted and began fucking your mouth.

The room was filled with sounds of you choking and moaning and him eating your soaking pussy and those breaths that you drew from him when you swallowed him just right. During your finish, he stopped his hips, denying himself the same relief. This happened several times and you wouldn’t have minded if he did it for the rest of the night. You didn’t understand how you could want more after all he had given you, but you did. More of his mouth, his hands, his cock.

When he pulled himself from your mouth, he was hard again. You didn’t let him tell you what to do next. You just reached for him, one hand wrapping around his cock and the other massaging his sac. You didn’t stop even though he was fucking you with his fingers, cruel and punishing, until he was spilling out on your skin.

He watched as you let your hands spread his cum all over your breasts and down your body to your pussy where more of him remained. You covered as much of yourself as you could in it and all he could think was that he wanted to do the same to the rest of your body, particularly your ass.

You knew immediately what was coming next. You got up, haphazardly crawled around the mattress until you could lie down and pressed your ass against him eagerly. He got his cock wet with your dripping center, just lightly dipping in and chuckling at the weak sounds you made, and then slowly, he pressed into your asshole.

You gripped at the sheets as he fed you more and more of his cock. Once more, when his hips were flush against you, he became insatiable. He used you to get every last ounce of frustration out and you felt powerful and wanted. He was rough and relentless, he didn’t care how many times you orgasmed, he didn’t care that you were overstimulated and overwhelmed.

You were sweating and shaking, impossibly wet, but he kept going because your hips were driving back to meet his thrusts. You could whine and beg as much as you wanted but Steve knew your body and he was the one that decided when you had had enough. You grabbed at his arms where he had them placed over your head on the mattress for balance, desperate to touch him, to bring him closer to you.

He never stopped fucking you while he situated himself on his side and pulled you along with him. He held you against his chest, arms wound tightly around you as his fingers either pinched your nipples, wrapped around your throat, or rubbed your clit. You were drowning in dozens of sensations that you couldn’t distinguish if your life depended on it.

When Steve finished again, he held onto you almost desperately. He whispered in your ear, the sweetest things, a major contrast compared to the entire night. “Thank you, baby doll, I’ve needed that since I got home.” He took your jaw in his hand and turned you to face him. “Do you love daddy?”

You nodded and made this pathetic noise because you stupidly thought you were capable of forming words. He smiled a little and suddenly, you were just lost in him. His eyes. His lips. His entire fucking unfairly beautiful face.

“Did daddy make you feel good tonight?”

You nodded again. You didn’t know much but you did know that you were high off these things that Steve did to you.

He gave you a single, chaste kiss. “You deserved it, baby girl.”

You began turning your body toward him and he took the hint. He pulled out, grabbing the blankets that were strewn all around the bed. You curled up against him, so tiny and so weak, and he was brimming with pride because he did that to you and you let him and you, this amazing fucking person, loved him. He wasn’t sure what he did to deserve it, but he didn’t ponder too long as he wrapped you up in the blankets and cradled you against him.

tags:

@donutloverxo @chris-evans-indian-fanfic @onetwo3000

[i-love-ninjago-kai]

I'm watching s7 and was very excited to see Skylor again even if it was only for that little bit. I didn't ship Kailor the first time around but now I really do! If you dont mind, what are your thoughts on their relationship at that point? Both in general and specifically how they help each other with their issues. like Kai coming to her for advice about thinking his dad is evil. Love your analysis of kai so much <3

Hi friend, thank you so much! You’re such a sweetie :)

Let’s see... This is a bit hard to put into words. Kailor, if we wanna be basic, is in essence, the “hot couple” in the group, they’re both pretty, and they know it.

At least they would be... If they were actually together. 

Skylor and Kai have this thing where they flirt, and give eachother bedroom eyes almost constantly, and they know that they like each other... They’re just too afraid/awkward to actually like, do anything about it. 

The two of them both have insane intimacy issues, 

 Kai having trust issues that run so deep he has trouble making actually meaningful relationships. He loves attention, sure, after losing his parents at such a young age, he’ll take any he can get. But actually letting someone in? In a romantic sense, being willing to be vulnerable? Kai doesn’t know if it’s possible, and that terrifies him, because Kai does, honest to FSM, love Skylor.

But Kai has been hurt by people, over and over again, he’s been betrayed even by himself, when he allowed himself to be corrupted by the staff. And he’s reminded of that every day, because that corruption still lives inside him, like a virus.

All he’s ever wanted to do was protect, and if he fails to protect Skylor, if he truely acknowledges how deeply he feels for her, and then something happens to her? He wouldn’t know what to do, a part of him would die with her, and it would never come back.

Sky has her own inner demons as well. Sure... She runs a multimillion dollar restaurant chain, and could buy pretty much anything she wants... But her dad also tried to massacre ninjago by turning his employees and his own daughter into a snake. 

And she went along with it. Did she want to? No, somehow along the way Skylor managed to develop a conscience, and never liked doing what her dad wanted, but her fear crippled her, and she did whatever he wanted despite her own morals. And that in itself scares Skylor, because she doesn’t want to think that she’s capable of that amount of evil, but deep down she knows she is. 

She hasn’t full realized who she is, partly because she also has no idea who her mother was, either, did she actually like her father? Or was it some kind of forced marriage? Sky doesn’t like either option, but the thought that both of her parents could have been malicious, terrible people, keeps her up at night. 

Her father didn’t start out insane, it had to grow over time, and Skylor is terrified that over time, it will grow in her. And it’s selfish, but her first thought, her first fear, is if she’ll hurt Kai. 

Because Kai is different from anyone she’s ever met. He saw her, even after she betrayed and saw him chained to the floor to have his fire stolen from him, he saw her heart. When she had neuro’s element, she looked into his mind, it’s an invasion of privacy, but Sky’s moral compass when it comes to minding her own business is kinda broken. 

She saw everything, felt what he felt for her, and she’d be lying if she said she wasn’t whipped for him.

So... They love eachother... Like, a lot, but they’re both dancing around actually being together. 

At this point, they are each other’s lifelines, they can talk to eachother about anything, and this is shown in s7 especially. Kai desperately needs to open up to someone, and while he adores the ninja, even his sister... He’s not very good at being open with them either. But with her... With her he can be real, because she doesn’t see the big tough firecracker front he puts up, she sees Kai, big brother who had to raise his younger sister and had to grow up too soon. Because she had to grow up too.

Sure, at the time, he went to her because she was the daughter of an evil figure... But he didn’t need to come to her, Lloyd is right there and would have been happy to be a sounding board, But Lloyd isn’t Skylor. He loves him and would to literally anything to protect him, but being with Skylor... It’s freeing.

She listens intently, never judging how he feels, never trying to fix everything. Her red hair framing her face as she gives him the most caring and attentive face he’s ever seen, proving that she is listening to him, totally any completely.

It’s the same way for Skylor, she feels light as a feather listening to his dulcet voice, and watching his hair bounce when he talks. Kai is the only person to make her blush. No, really... She’s flirted with tons of guys, done tons of things with guys, (Although really, it was always some scheme to get something from them for her father.) and none of them make her feel the way he does when she flirts.

She goes red and speechless for a second, blinking away trying to make it less obvious that she is completely and utterly enamored with this guy.

They are all of these things, feel all of these things... And They’re still terrified to make the next move. They yearn to touch each other, be closer in a way that’s more than just sitting across eachother in a booth, or walking in a park. They wanna kiss and hold hands, do other things and just be together, always.

But fear.. Fear is stopping them, and the only thing that would work to get them to finally get their head’s out of the clouds is if one of them gets hurt.

Revealing the possibility that they could lose each other... Now that would do it, and once they go in for it, they go all in. They’d be engaged by like three months in.

All of this drives the Ninja crazy, because they waited so freakin long.

Speaking of long... This is really long, sorry about that. I kinda cut it off at the end because of it, but I hope this is what you wanted! Thanks again love.

[error403hrd]

[Image description: three figures are shown. The one on the left is floating in the air, he has dark tan skin and tons of freckles. Scattered on his skin are light green swirls, circles, and dots. His eyes are a bright green. He has an orange bandana, a light blue vest, an off white shirt, light brown pants, an orange strip of fabric tied around his waist, and dark brown shoes/short boots. Beneath him is written: "Waker, God of Winds, Age 10 (468)". In the middle, standing barefoot, is a boy with curly blonde hair and golden eyes. His skin is a healthy pale, and he's dressed in a dark blue robe with light blue trim, decorated with small golden hourglasses. Above him is written: "Sand, God of Reality, Age 12 (1728)". The last person has long blonde hair, flowing over their shoulder with silver clasps to keep it out if their face. Their eyes are a bright teal and their skin is a deathly pale. They wear a black dress shirt with a tiered ruffled skirt. The skirt's band is a dark purple, and the skirt alternates between dark turquoise, dark purple, and dark turquoise again. They're wearing high heeled black boots. Above them is written: "Phantom, God of Souls, Age 19 (935)".]

I drew this and i'm super proud of the skirt.

Phantom uses they/them, Sand doesn't care but defaults to he/him, Waker uses he/him.

So this is for my fic, the one with the super cool unreleased artwork. I changed Scribe's name to Sand because I changed the story to add in two more God!Winds

Here's a rundown of their powers and backgrounds and stuff:

Waker: When he died, the wind waker merged with his soul and Zephos and Cyclos claimed him and made him a god. He's more powerful than both of them because of the wind waker and the triforce. They trained him to use his powers, so he's the most well trained of the three God!Winds despite being the youngest. He can manipulate air in every way: he can make it solid, manipulate its flow, cause harsh storms, and even speak through it. He'll survive the merging of his timeline, Zephos and Cyclos won't. He's a bit of a showoff, and also rather childish, but he knows when to behave: he was a king after all!

Sand: Oshus shattered the remains of the Phantom Hourglass, killing himself on accident. When Wind died, his soul was spirited to the Inbetween, and he was confined to the Temple of the Ocean King, even when all of Oshus's islands disappeared. All that remained was an incomprehensible void. The hourglass chains him to the dais, he can't be more than five feet from it. Without Oshus he doesn't really know the extent of his powers, he can see all timelines, start timeline merges, and see the future under certain circumstances. Through the course of the story he learns that he can time travel and manipulate the sand itself into whip-like weapons and solid objects (which means all three God!Winds are capable of flight in their own way lmao). He has yet to realize that he can create false realities like Oshus, and consequently create false souls. He also has the ability to merge fantasy and reality, which would understandably cause chaos. He can also dream walk, but it's kinda useless so I doubt he'll ever find that out. He has a lot of mental issues, and he's tried to kill himself a lot, without success. He's the only god that literally can't die because of his job as the "timekeeper." He's very depressed and does his best to drown his depression in science and learning. It doesn't always work. He also has attachment issues because he knows he'll inevitably be alone again, but he can't help his gushing and talkative nature when around people he likes. He needs therapy very badly.

Phantom: When they died, their soul reacted with the Spirit Flute, a recently discovered artifact that they'd been studying. They'd been able to see ghosts after the Bellum debacle (all Winds can do that), and the Spirit Flute was in tune with their magic and soul because of it. One thing led to another, and Phantom accidentally became the God of Souls (thanks in part to the blessings from Zephos and Cyclos). Zephos and Cyclos did their best, but they couldn't really do much to teach them. It took a while, but Phantom figured out that they could change their age, physical gender, clothing, hair length and style, and that they could turn into a ghost at will (though the lack of taste, smell, and touch unnerves them so they don't do it very often). They can also tell when and how someone is going to die, and they can see every single memory and feeling that person felt if they wish (though the invasion of privacy makes them uncomfortable). They can change how someone dies, but only if it's a murder or accident, because illness and old age aren't exactly easy to fix. They also have the power to exorcise ghosts, but they only do it to violent assholes that refuse to move on. Their job is to make sure the ghosts can move on and do their best to hurry up the process. They've got a quiet maturity about them. They've been around a long time, but not long enough that they've started to develop issues (like Sand, though he was alone for nearly 2000 years, so). They quietly fulfill their duty, leading innocent children and heinous villains alike to peace. They don't really know what happens when a ghost achieves peace, but they know it has to be better than endless wandering. They're a kind person, but they've got a fair bit of sass. A mom friend, essentially.

So yeah. I love them all very much. My babies. Feel free to use them.

It's 4am....

[brokasteltranslations]

Fate/Requiem: Chapter 3

The next day, I paid a visit to a certain information broker. I brought Pran with me, and this time he was not refused entry.

–

On the surface, it appeared to be a cosy little luxury hotel catered towards tourists. In a corner of the austere Renaissance-styled lobby were two concierges. Cesare, the elder, and Lucrezia, the younger: the Servant duo known together as the Borgia siblings.

Calculating minds housed in youthful bodies. The kind of Servant I was worst at dealing with.

The two were all but identical in stature and visage, as though they were twins. A boy and girl, slim and graceful, the image of angelic purity. They answered to their Master, the ageing hotel manager, but it was common knowledge that almost all of the management of the hotel was left to them.

Cesare, the elder, who in life had been the right hand of his father the Pope, and with the rank of Archbishop had wielded authority both within and without the Holy See. Lucrezia, the younger, who armed with her heavenly beauty had married over and over into political advantage. The siblings' names were infamous even today, mostly in connection with the mysterious and untimely deaths met by many who opposed their ambitions.

–

“My, if it isn't Erice!”

“Good evening, Erice.”

The pair smiled at me, with their elbows resting on the marble reception desk.

“We thought it was about time for you to pay us a visit.”

“That child you have with you – so he's the Masterless Servant everyone's talking about?”

I turned a blind eye to their proddings. The boy must have taken a shine to the antique goggles in my apartment, because he'd worn them all the way here.

The siblings nonchalantly slid me a shot glass across the counter as they greeted us. The sharp scent of spirits wafted through the air.

“I can't. I'm underage.” I would have to choose my words carefully, and be cautious in my every move with these two. They offered some juice instead, and Pran reached out for it. I placed a firm hand on his shoulder and pulled him back behind me.

“Would you happen know anything about it?”

Lucrezia gently crossed her legs on the tall chair behind the desk, and shook her head. “Unfortunately not. Or at least, nothing more than what's available on the municipal network.”

“But that aside... perhaps you might be interested in this.” Cesare placed a storage device on the desk. It couldn't have been bigger than my little finger, and was equipped with a magical lock. Anyone designated as the key could access the information it contained directly, without the need for a smartphone or similar device, but it was otherwise very difficult to hack.

“What am I looking at?”

“A list of citizens who have attempted to conduct unsanctioned summonings, ranging from the day before yesterday to several days prior. With particular emphasis on those whose rituals failed or ended prematurely.”

“...I see.”

This would have to be the first step in any investigation, barring an extraordinary stroke of luck. It was precious information that would ordinarily take a great deal of time and effort to gather, and now it was being offered all too easily. Unsanctioned summons were illegal, of course, but the invasion of others' privacy also carried heavy penalties in Mosaic City – although if one balked at the notion of invading others' privacy, the profession of information broker perhaps wasn't for them.

“What a curiously generous offer.”

“We're simply glad to be of service to you, Erice.”

“I'm delighted to hear it.”

These siblings would often require payment in more than money. In the past, I'd had to let slip secrets I'd learned of the criminal underworld in exchange for their information. More than a few times, it had later come to light that a Servant I had disposed of had been someone they considered an inconvenience. I didn't like to admit it, but odds were good that I was playing an unwitting puppet on invisible strings.

So caution was vital.

I gently withdrew the hand I had extended towards the storage device. It was alluring bait, but more than likely poisoned.

“Actually, it's not because of him that I'm here today.”

“Well then, what are you here for?”

“Chitose came here, didn't she? Sometime last night, most likely.”

The siblings' expressions were inscrutable. They were waiting to see what move I would make.

“I've had my assignments from Caren suspended, so I'll be closing up business for a while. There isn't much I could do for you even if I wanted to.”

Cesare measured up myself and Pran, his chin resting on the palm of his hand. “Business, eh? You know, Erice, there are many people who suffer because of your work, and a scarce few who benefit from it. But above all...”

Lucrezia continued where her brother left off. “You yourself gain nothing from it, do you? What's wrong with taking this opportunity to enjoy a little vacation away from it all?”

“If it's retribution from people you've crossed that concerns you, we can show you a wonderful safe house. Although it might weigh a little heavy on the wallet.”

“A safe house, you say.” 

Well, this clinched it. Chitose had come here, and coerced them. Threatened them. But it seemed like they had no intention of concealing that fact. So what did that mean?

There must have been something else they were hiding. I had no choice but to show my hand.

I heaved a theatrical sigh. “You know, I had a little chat with the relic salesman in the Akiba Department Store. He mentioned that when Kundry attempted to procure the materials for an unsanctioned summoning, a certain information broker intervened to vouch for her. An interesting story, don't you think?”

It wasn't a bluff. I had returned to the relic shop after parting ways with Karin on the previous day.

“I've also heard that there have been some new traps on the market recently. Ones that leech power from ley lines, that have proven very popular among less savoury times. If you know anything, I'd greatly appreciate if you could share it. It's very important I be properly prepared, just in case, you understand. Well? How about it, Signor? Signora?”

Their expressions stiffened for the slightest of moments. Even if I wasn't currently on a direct assignment from a municipal administration AI, I still had just cause to take immediate action if I personally witnessed an attempt to interfere with the city's infrastructure.

“Ahaha... Oh, Erice. You best us yet again.” Lucrezia gave a tinkling laugh as she leaned over her brother's back. Stretching over his shoulder, she took back the storage device on the desk, before setting down a new one. Surprise and a hint of protest marred Cesare's otherwise unreadable expression. It seemed that this time, the sister had read one move further ahead.

“They do say that there is no word “no” in a concierge's dictionary. Is that not so, Cesar?”

“So it is, Lucrezia. So it is.”

These Servants lived their lives atop the thinnest layer of ice. If I were to start asking the wrong questions, they would be finished as information brokers. If they wanted to avoid that fate, they had had no choice but to reveal their own hands.

With my work here done, I departed the lobby. I felt no desire to stay. This was a tranquil and beautiful place, but it was not one to remain in for long – its noxious atmosphere made it hard to breathe.

Three spouses and eight children...I wonder what that feels like.

There was no end to the mysteries surrounding these siblings, and I found my thoughts turning to the sister in particular. Historically Lucrezia had been nothing more than a pawn used to engineer political marriages, but I wondered how much influence she had really exerted over her brother, Cesare, and her father, Pope Alexander VI. I wondered if they had not in fact been her puppets, dancing on the strings of the spider at the heart of the web.

–

“'Til next time, Reaper.” “We look forward to your next visit.”

The siblings waved goodbye as they saw me off from behind the counter.

“Goodbye.”

Pran waved back in polite response.

----

We decided to take a break at a nearby coffee shop - the Bookshop Cafe Borges, where one could relax surrounded by a veritable forest of tomes from the old world. It was one of my favourite relaxation spots.

The first floor comprised a cafe area, a wide space for pleasant conversation. An open stairwell led up to the second floor, where innumerable bookshelves stood crammed together so tightly that it looked like the floor might give out. Sofas and chairs were placed between the labyrinthine shelves, on which one could fully immerse themselves in the pleasure of reading.

On a whim I asked the ageing, mild-mannered shopkeeper, and learned that they did indeed have a first-edition English print of “The Little Prince” in their collection. It may not have been a personal artefact of the man himself, but it could certainly have been a sufficient catalyst to summon Saint-Exupéry. However, when I showed the manuscript to Pran, he exhibited no special response. In the end, all I learned was that he was capable of reading and writing English. The quirky illustrations at least seemed to capture his interest, although as usual he reacted poorly to the snake.

I was far from giving up on the search for his true name, but I could not justify pursuing the Saint-Exupéry connection any further out of anything but my own wishful thinking.

Over a light lunch, I decided to check the storage device the Borgia siblings had given me. And the shock I felt on seeing the news recorded therein was enough to obliterate any trace of lingering attachment to Saint-Exupéry.

–

They called it the Command Seal Hunter.

A chain of murders had visited Mosaic City, connected by a common thread: all of the victims had died with their Command Seals stolen, forcibly severed from their body with the appendages that bore them. No reports had yet been issued from Akihabara, but people had been found dead in other wards – and the victims were not the kind of underground magi that I was used to tangling with. They were ordinary citizens.

In this new world, where illness and death had been conquered, the most common place to see the names of people who had died was in murder reports. Some things could not be avoided, even with the protection of the Holy Grail.

I thought that was what I was here for...

One of the most unusual aspects about this particular series of crimes was the amount of time that had elapsed before they were discovered. If the victims had been killed and their bodies concealed, finding them would have been comparatively easy; that was what the Caren series was for. However, that was not what had happened. Instead, for several days after being stripped of their Command Seals, the victims had continued to live their lives as normal.

One of them had the Command Seals on his right hand stolen, and he just wore a glove to conceal the wound. A glove! And what's more, there's no record of those Command Seals being used in the interim...

There were even records here of conversations they had had with neighbours, meaningless small talk. Each and every one of them had concealed the wound they'd suffered – some skilfully, others very poorly. The truth was often only discovered after they suddenly collapsed unconscious in the middle of whatever they were doing. Or perhaps some task in their daily lives had required the use of a Command Seal, and only then had others pointed out the abnormality where their Command Seals used to be.

Some sort of drug to dull their sense of pain? Perhaps incredibly powerful hypnosis? No, impossible. Some of them lost whole limbs, for crying out loud! How could someone not realise their own throat had been torn out? But then...they must...

I shuddered. The victims must already have been dead at the point when their Command Seals were taken. And then their lifeless bodies had continued to act out their everyday routine.

This was a case unlike anything I'd ever seen. My appetite slowly disappeared as I read further. Was a Servant responsible for these murders, or a magus? Both were possible. And with the rate that these cases were appearing, and the time that had elapsed before their discovery...

It was more than possible that other victims were walking the streets of Akihabara right now. This wasn't something I could ignore.

I gulped, and cast a glance around the cafe. My gaze lingered involuntarily on a woman with gloved hands. At a customer wearing unusually thick clothing.

–

Then I saw the Command Seal glowing on the back of their hand. They were merely communicating with their Servant.

–

The Command Seals of the pre- and post-war worlds were supposedly very different. In a true Holy Grail War, their use would be limited, and they would be visibly divided into a number of distinct strokes; usually three. Three strokes, with one use per stroke, for a total of three uses before they were gone. Or so I had heard, anyway. The past was often less convenient than the present, I supposed.

Command Seals in this new world were different on almost all counts. For a start, they were not divided into distinct parts. At first glance they may appear to be partitioned in three, but closer inspection would reveal they actually comprised a detailed, interlinking pattern that would fade on usage proportional to the amount of mana expended. Secondly, a faded Command Seal would recover with time, courtesy of the Grail replenishing its mana. The recovery time varied a little from person to person depending on their aptitude for magecraft, but broadly speaking it would take only a few days.

Thirdly, while (as the name implied) Command Seals were traditionally used to command one's Servant, temporarily strengthening their abilities, this had become less and less of a necessity as a result of the dramatic change in Master-Servant relationships. Nowadays, they were often utilised as a simple mana source, a means of granting the Master access to thaumaturgy. If anything, in today's world, that had become the more common usage.

Only two people in this city did not possess a set of these Command Seals: myself, and Manazuru Chitose.

Chitose, however, still retained the Command Seals she had obtained during her own Grail War. Perhaps that made little practical difference in everyday life, but it was still more than I had.

–

A group of three entered the cafe: two tall men, and a young girl barely half their height. The girl exchanged a few words with one of her companions, and grinned. She wore a familiar-looking white coat draped over her shoulders.

“Haruko? What's she doing here?”

She swept her gaze around the cafe, and gave a small start; clearly, she had seen me too. The child seated next to me probably hadn't helped make me any less conspicuous. I noticed that the hat she usually wore low over her face was absent today.

For their part, her companions were visibly muscular, and exuded a distinctive aura. It was obvious at first glance – to me, at least - that they were Servants. In the lead was a cheerful-looking man in the late throes of middle age, with copper skin and a lush beard. The other man trailing behind was almost his polar opposite: a young man with sickly pale skin and a melancholic demeanour, and silver hair drawn together into a rough ponytail that cascaded down his back.

“A friend of yours, Koharu?”

“Um, of a sort. We attend lectures at the same community college-”

“She's the Reaper, you know. Get too close, and she'll steal your soul.”

“Galahad! Shush!” Haruko was quick to meet the pale man's sardonic interjection with a quick rebuke; he acted nonplussed, but said no more. She seemed very different from the way she usually came across during class. However, more to the point...

They know I'm the Reaper... Wait, what? Galahad? He looks nothing like that knight I saw onscreen... Although... Yes, that's right. I suppose he wouldn't, would he?

“One of your classmates, eh? Well, why don't we pull up some chairs and get acquainted?” The middle-aged man spoke to Haruko – Koharu, had he called her? Is that her real name, then? - with odd familiarity. She nodded in assent, albeit a little hesitantly.

–

We moved over to a round table further inside the cafe. The middle-aged man sat next to Koharu opposite Pran and I, with his stout, hairy arms rested heavily on the table, grinning at the two of us. He was dressed in a short-sleeved safari shirt and a pair of shorts, and looked for all the world like a visiting tourist. The intellectual air lent by his round-framed glasses made for a curious contrast with the rest of his outfit.

Galahad sat at the side, leaning back disinterestedly on his chair. He wore a deep purple – indigo? - dress shirt rolled up to the elbows, and black skinny jeans. The shirt lay open at the collar to reveal a chest even paler than his arms.

Their arrival at the cafe had caused an evident stir. The rest of the customers had shrunk back from our table, and I could feel their glances burning into me.

This is... awkward...

This must be life when you were a celebrity, a Grail Tournament winner. Only a few minutes ago I had been overwhelmed by the terror and panic of the serial killings, but for the time being those feeling had been shut away firmly in a box and neatly shelved.

The man leaned forward with an amiable smile. “I must say, it came as quite a shock to learn Koharu was classmates with the famous Reaper.”

“Not as shocked as I am”, I replied. “It's hard to believe I'm sitting across the table from Hannibal of Carthage.”

I felt a little uncertain how to react to someone I had only just met referring to me as the Reaper, but  my words – and my respect - were sincere. Even if I was talking to a participant in the Grail Tournament.

“Hannibal's the commander of the team I've been assigned to”, Koharu supplied, a little hesitantly.

“Your team? You mean the next Tournament is going to be a team battle?”

“Indeed it is.” Hannibal folded his arms with evident confidence. “And the newest member of our team won the Rookie Tournament handily. Our victory is all but assured.”

“H-Hannibal! I, um... I'm not... I'm not that good...” Koharu shrank back, red-faced. I could hardly blame her. If a general as famous as Hannibal had placed me so high in his estimation, I probably would have done the same.

Don't worry, I get it. Although it's a bit of a surprise to see that even you can look embarrassed once in a while.

“And I get to cart around the kid and her great-grandad. I'm telling you now, I don't do bedtime stories... or hospice care.” Galahad chipped in with another snide remark, and Koharu rounded on him again, teeth bared in a hissing snarl.

–

In tie, I learned that Hannibal's Master was currently negotiating conditions with members of other teams. Koharu had shown the trio to this cafe during a break in the discussions. Expanding a Servant's range of independent action in this way was among the most common uses of Command Seals.

The sheer volume of information flooding in from across the table was overwhelming, and it was difficult to know where to even begin to reply. Until yesterday, I had barely even known what the Grail Tournament was.

I cast a sidelong glance at the Knight of the Grail. He was preoccupying himself with his meal in haughty silence, although I noticed that he was only picking at his roast beef and yorkshire pudding, and was focused primarily on his glass of red wine. Again, the polar opposite of Hannibal's healthy appetite. It occurred to me that if Koharu had been attending the Pre-War Human History lectures, Galahad had also likely been present in spirit form. It was likely that he already knew me. We had probably passed by each other any times without my knowing it.

“Planning to stare all day, Reaper? If you want a bite, you only had to ask.” He made to push his plate towards me, and was only stopped by Koharu's grip on his arm.

I'm not sure I envy her this one.

–

Karin's words from yesterday came back to me: “How sincere other people are isn't something you get to decide.”

Many Servants had gotten accustomed to life in this new, peaceful world. However, others had spent their entire lives on the battlefield, and dedicated themselves wholly to the craft of war. It came down to the individual whether they had had their fill of fighting or still lusted for blood.

Hannibal, it seemed, was the latter kind - which meant that was the fate indicated to his Master by the Grail. The Grail Tournament was a precious opportunity for such Servants to let themselves loose to their hearts’ content in pursuit of exhilaration and glory. I supposed that was, in its own way, a kind of freedom.

But that's not why Koharu is here. She isn't like the rest of them. She's different somehow...

----

The Grail Tournament was yet to officially publicise any information regarding the background of one Koharu F. Riedenflaus, but my own investigations had borne some modest fruit.

House Riedenflaus was a family of Magi associated with the Clocktower, with its roots in the necromantic traditions. They were low in status compared with the elite of the Magus Association, and their history spanned only a few centuries. However, it seemed that their longtime occupation of the seat at the foot of the aristocratists' table had been enough to grant them entry to the city.

The promoter of the Grail Tournament was none other than this House Riedenflaus. In other words, they were actively and brazenly flouting the first precept of the Magus Association, the Concealment of the Mysteries. I was curious as to how their mentality had evolved to suit this new post-war world, but it was something else I uncovered in the course of my investigations that had really drawn my interest: that their family's magic revolved around the creation of artificial life forms, or homunculi.

Koharu's youthful appearance had initially led me to assume that she was a member of the next generation. However, now that I knew her surname, I was beginning to wonder if it indicated something else entirely.

–

Hannibal regaled us with anecdotes of his past exploits as we ate. I listened, half fascinated and half starstruck, as he spoke with good humour of the great defeat his army had faced on the field of battle. The tale also seemed to have caught Pran's interest, because he listened cheerfully. Eventually, he chimed in with an unexpected question.

“What's a 'war'?”

Not only myself, but Koharu, Hannibal and even Galahad stared at him with mouths agape.

“What's a 'war'?”, he repeated.

“Um, well... It's a war, right? Like a battle?” I knew that hardly constituted an answer, but I was at a loss as to how to respond. The idea of a Servant ignorant of the very concept of war had taken us all by surprise.

“Like killing?”

“That's right. Lots of killing. More than you can ever imagine.” Hannibal's voice was composed, but his gaze was chilly through his round-framed glasses. “And yet we humans never seem to tire of it. It's just a part of who we are.”

Not a single day in all of human history had passed devoid of war. A Heroic Spirit who doesn't know what war is? Impossible.

A part of me hoped for another sarcastic quip from Galahad – anything to change the subject - but none were forthcoming. He sat with mouth pursed firmly closed. The gazes drilling into Pran were beginning to make me feel distinctly uneasy, and I hurriedly asked Hannibal for another story of his time as a general. It was at times like this that I appreciated Karin's power to effortlessly lighten the mood.

–

A few minutes passed before I noticed that Koharu was gazing at her lap in listless silence. I thought to call out to her, but my mouth had only gotten half-open before her eyes suddenly snapped to me.

“Is something the matter?”

“Um, Miss Riedenflaus? I was wondering-”

She raised a hand to stop me. “Please just call me Koharu. I'm the youngest here, after all.”

“I see.” My next question almost tumbled from my mouth before I could stop it, but I managed to bite it back just in time.

What are you thinking? You can't ask her that! What are you even expecting her to say? “Why yes, I am a homunculus, thank you very much for asking”?

It would have been bigoted, self-centred and an invasion of privacy all in one. To probe people who had caught my interest for their weak points was an unfortunate habit of mine.

“I... I saw footage of you fighting. At the Rookie Tournament. Watching you fighting to the bitter end against an opponent like that... It was amazing. I'm not sure I could do that even if I had the strongest Servant in the world beside me.”

“Um... Thank you very much.” Koharu lowered her eyes, blushing fiercely. “I know I got very lucky, but managing to win... made me really happy...”

She gave a smile that was mostly bashful, although somewhere in there was a flicker of pride. Watching her struggle to contain her delight, I could wish her only the best. Half of what I had said had been borrowed from a certain JK, but I had rewatched the video since, and my admiration was the real thing.

“I'm sorry about yesterday. I was very rude to you.” She spoke sheepishly, eyes fixed firmly on the fingertips she was pressing together.

“Eh? Oh, that. Don't sweat it. I get that you were in a hurry.”

“Thank you. I was in such a rush, it just kind of came out...”

This girl was modest to a fault – and perhaps that was that sincerity, the warrior's pride she displayed in spite of her age, that invited me to lower my guard. Whatever the case, I got ahead of myself, and asked something I would not even have put to Karin.

–

“I was wondering if I could ask you something.”

I wanted to know more about that armoured knight I had seen onscreen. Perhaps, I wondered, there might be something I could learn from her about my own curse.

“Could you tell me a little more about that “Possession” they mentioned on the programme?”

“My Possession? I, um...” Koharu cast a hesitant glance at Galahad.

“Now wait just a moment, you two.” For a while Hannibal had been content just to watch us, but now he interrupted. I could see half-chewed food still in his mouth as he spoke. “If you wish to learn more of her abilities, you must see them for yourself. We are not scribes, with pen and parchment. We are warriors, with sword and spear and fist! Come to the Colosseum, Erice, and watch us do battle. It should not be long before our next bout.”

“You mean you're inviting her to spectate? Aren't the tickets all sold out? I suppose we could hope for cancellations, but there are always so many people waiting...”

The notion of acquiring tickets through anything other than official channels seemed to genuinely not have occurred to Koharu. Hannibal, laughing heartily, informed her that there were always other ways.

And so, I ended up exchanging contact details with Koharu F. Riedenflaus, the celebrity. She promised to inform me as soon as she had gotten hold of tickets, although she seemed a little bewildered by the way things had transpired. It was comforting to know I was not the only one who felt that they had lost control of this conversation.

At this point, there's no way I can tell them I don't really care all that much about the Tournament...

–

For a while I phased out. In the end, it was Galahad who brought me crashing back to reality.

“Spend too long entertaining the elderly and you'll be one of them before you know it, Reaper.”

“Um... Galahad?”

“If you've got something to ask, just ask it. Koharu'll jump at the chance to trade it for anything you've got on the Stigmata, I guarantee it.”

Utter silence. For a moment I struggled for a response... and then, with a clatter, Koharu grabbed her fork, lifted it, and drove it back down towards the table with all her might. Directly in its path lay Galahad's hand. My and Pran's eyes widened in shock. An attack from an ordinary human would appear as though in slow-motion to a Servant, and I felt sure that he would dodge it with ease, but as I watched it became clearer and clearer that he had no intention of moving a muscle.

Thud. The fork slammed down just between his fingers, with barely a couple of millimetres to spare.

“You should learn some manners, my lady. Just look what you've done to our round table.”

“...My apologies. I promise I'll pay for it.”

Koharu apologised for her poor behaviour, and hung her head in silence. Hannibal stood up, apparently unfazed by the discord between his compatriots.

“I'm sorry, but I will have to depart. My master is calling for me.”

The trio finished paid the proprietors for the damage to their table, and left the shop.

----

Left alone with Pran once more, I found myself wondering what sort of person Hannibal's Master might be. The two were bound together by the fate indicated by the Grail. Would they be Hannibal's equal, carefree and bold? Or would they be his opposite, a stern, cold tactician?

Masters... and Servants...

Sometimes, like Koharu and Galahad, their relationship was impossible to understand from the outside.

I tried to return to my previous train of thought about the Command Seal Hunter, but something from the previous conversation continued to niggle at me.

You're being silly, Erice. Stop overthinking things.

There was no logical reason that they, likely the strongest warriors in Mosaic City, had put me so ill at ease. But...

“If you've got something to ask, just ask it.” On the face of it, Galahad had simply been referring to my questions about Koharu. However, I felt something deeper there, something urging me on.

Maybe Chitose and Ms. Fujimura don't want me involved in this, but I can't just sit here and do nothing.

On a sudden impulse, I left Pran in the care of the shopkeeper and dashed out of the cafe.

–-

Luck was on my side, and I managed to catch up with the trio on the road to the Colosseum. I flagged them down and came to a stop in front of them, my breathing ragged.

“If you know I'm the Reaper... then let me at least give you a warning.”

While keeping my voice low, conscious of being overheard by passers-by, I told them everything I had just learned about the Command Seal Hunter. About the mysterious, indiscriminate murders that were even now being suppressed from the municipal information network, and the Servants who had become collateral damage.

“If you want to know more, it's all on this data drive.”

“Are you sure?”

I released the lock on the storage drive and replaced it with Koharu's personal signature. She extended out a grateful hand to take it.

“Thank you.”

“No worries.”

I didn't know if I had managed to fully convince them of the gravity of the situation, but they had at least taken me seriously enough to listen without bursting out in laughter.

“Even if no victims have yet been discovered in this ward, we cannot risk any harm coming to spectators. It may be tricky, but I will see about raising the matter with the security staff.”

“Thank you, Hannibal.”

“In any case, we cannot allow anything to interfere with Rome's downfall!” The general set his fingers to his chin and flashed a brilliant smile.

“That sounds awfully confident for you of all Servants...”

“Wha...? Don't tell me you're a Rome supporter, Erice?!”

“Eh? But our next opponents aren't even Roman.” Koharu cocked her head, puzzled.

“Just ignore him.” Galahad's tone was as sardonic as ever. “Start giving old men the time of day and they'll never shut up.”

“Please do come to the tournament, Erice.” With those parting words, Koharu turned around and headed back towards the arena with her companions. She did not look back.

[love-mikes-hinoda-blog]

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[kylosupremeimagines]

In Defense To Kylo Ren’s Character

I see posts all the time saying things like “Kylo is pure evil, there’s no way he can be redeemed!” to “Kylo is old enough to understand the things that he is doing, there is no excuse!”. I can understand where arguments such as these come from. I can't say for certain exactly what goes on through everyone’s head revolving around the subject, but I can tell you one thing that I see out of this; Kylo Ren is a manipulated Victim who has suffered many forms of abuse. Yes, I know that this doesn’t necessarily excuse some of the things that he has done. But when you really look into his character and his affiliation with Snoke, it’s easy to come to the conclusion that he has been abused and manipulated.

Abandonment

Starting from when he was a padawan, he had been sent to train under Luke by his mother. Before, his parents were often caught up in their professions as a  Smuggler and Senator, and this was able to give him a sense of abandonment as a child. And then years later, his own uncle come sot their point where he is ready to kill Ben. Those factors could lead Kylo to believe that his family did not care enough about him, to give him a sense of abandonment by the people who are supposed to help support him through his life.

“There is nothing more powerful than genetics. If you really imagine the stakes of him in his youth, having all these special powers and having your parents kind of be absent during that process on their own agendas, equally as selfish. He’s lost in the world that he was raised in and feels that he was kind of abandoned by the people that he is closest with. He’s angry because of that,  I think, and he has a huge grudge on his shoulders.”  - Adam Driver

Training Under Snoke

Then you have the next stage in his life where he joined under Snoke to train to be much like Darth Vader. We have seen how he is treated by his master, who does not shy away from berating him with “and look at you, the deed split your spirit to the bone. You’re unbalanced! Bested by a girl who never held a lightsaber, you failed!” followed by a lightning shock as a form of discipline. If he’s willing to do this years into his training, just imagine what happened the first years when Kylo was still trying to figure out himself, more than likely having moments of hesitation and questioning of the path he was going down.

Manipulation

One thing that is undeniable is the fact that Snoke has been so manipulative of Kylo, even before he turned. One thing that I would like to bring up is how Snoke views someone such as Hux (Who is practically Kylo’s rival). "You wonder why I keep a rabid cur in such a place of power? A cur's weakness, properly manipulated can be a sharp tool,” note that with the proper definitions, it hints that Hux is merely seen as someone in “poor condition” that has an “[extreme} support of” both Snoke and the First Order. Seeing as how Snoke treats them in similar lights (not including the fact that Kylo trains under him), Kylo is in a similar position.

rab·id ˈrabəd,ˈrābəd/Submit adjective 1. having or proceeding from an extreme or fanatical support of or belief in something.

cur kər/Submit noun an aggressive dog or one that is in poor condition, especially a mongrel.

When Han finally confronts Kylo on the Base, he makes it clear that he believes that Snoke is  merely using him to do what he wants. Seeing Kylo’s reaction to the first time seeing his father in years, he is clearly crying, torn up on the inside. Han points out the fact that Snoke is using him for his benefit. You can almost see the realization by Kylo, or at least the moment he considers it and even questions the idea.

“Your son is gone. He was weak and foolish like his father, so I destroyed him.”

“That’s what snoke wants you to believe. But it is not true, my son is alive.”

“No… the supreme Leader is wise.”

“Snoke is using you for your power. When he gets what he wants, he will crush you. You know it’s true.”

“It’s too late.”

“No, it’s not, leave here with me. Come home. We miss you.”

The Abuse

Now, there are many types of abuse out there, and of course, he would have some types more than others. I don’t believe he was ever sexually abused, and Physical abuse was probably only used when Snoke wanted to discipline him. The two predominant ones have to be emotional and verbal abuse. There are plenty of ways the abuse can be explained. (note that of course, some of these are based on opinion, but they make sense depending on how you look at it)

Deflection: Kylo must be scared to speak up against Snoke most of the time regarding the things he has done or said, knowing that it would only be countered with something negative will come from it, such as physical punishment or the blame being turned towards him instead.  We see how quick Snoke is to berate and belittle his apprentice. 

False Loyalty: Snoke was able to convince Kylo that he respected him, valued him as an apprentice. But in reality? He would not hesitate to throw him away when the time called for it, he would kill him. He is giving Kylo a false sense of trust and loyalty.

Demoralizing: After feeling betrayed by his own family and having nowhere to turn, Kylo chose to follow under Snoke. With his influence, Snoke changed Kylo’s ways of thinking and eventually corrupting his own morals to the point where he believed some of the things he had been doing were not in the wrong.

Secretive: There had to have been plenty of things that Snoke had been keeping from Kylo - it be he didn’t want him to know of or he didn’t think he was ready. And that right there is evidence of mistrust, or in this case, manipulation because it would all most likely have formal connections to plans of Snoke that he did n’t want Kylo to be  aware of, as it could raise questions.

Lying/False Truths: It is highly doubtful that Kylo would have been willing to follow behind snoke if he knew what he was really getting himself into, a life of manipulation and mistreatment as a pawn to Snoke. His master also probably put incorrect emphasize on how Kylo’s family really felt about him, which would make the feeling of abandonment and betrayal by them even worse, giving more of a reason to leave.

Questioning his loyalties: Snoke has been seen questioning Kylo’s abilities to do something as simple as killing his father, so it is not hard to believe that he would have brought up Kylo’s loyalties towards him, it be addressing it directly or even subtly by inquiring him about a mission not being fulfilled successfully.  

Invasion of his mind: Snoke literally was keeping track of what was going through Kylo’s mind, he admits to this when he explained “I see his mind, I see his every intent” Just imagine living every day knowing that at any moment, your master would invade the privacy of your very mind.

Coercion: As Snoke’s apprentice, Kylo is expected to follow all his demands and not question it. Knowing how Snoke rules, it would be done with the use of an iron fist. Kylo knows that if he doesn’t do what is told of him, there will most likely be consequences.

Physical Punishment: This is just something that can not be denied, as we can see it in The Last Jedi when Kylo tries to retaliate against Snoke.

Results of the Abuse

As a result of everything that he would have to go through, I’m willing to bet that he suffers from at least one mental illness. Again, some examples:

Reliving the Trauma: I see him as someone who would suffer from nightmares as a result of all the things he has been through. Seeing as how he shows a capability of showing guilt, it may some as a result of the things he has done and come to regret, such as some people he wished he didn’t let die.

Avoiding reminders: When Snoke had brought up the topic of his  father, he seemed to try to brush it off quickly, even claiming “he means nothing to [him],” And even after killing him, he tries to show he doesn’t care when he refers to Han by his full name

Negative thinking:  Kylo seems like the type that would easily feel self-conscious about his progress with training and thinks that even little things means he is an utter failure. Snoke probably destroyed his self-esteem during his training, and may not even have much self-worth. He could also possibly believe that he doesn’t deserve to be loved, especially by his parents. 

Insomnia: Kylo has been depicted by fans to have issue sleeping at times, and it is a high possibility that it would be something he does suffer from. The haunting memories and thoughts probably keep him up at night, and even some physical symptoms he may be suffering from at the moment. 

Pushing passed his limits: With the expectation on him that he becomes as powerful - if not more - than Darth Vader, he would probably push himself during training just to grow stronger. It would range from pushing too hard to the point of exhaustion from not getting himself checked in the Medbay after injuries of any severity. He would do anything to grow stronger, even if it meant becoming numb to pain

Mood changes: As seen in the movies and other media, Kylo has some major issues when it comes to controlling his emotions, especially his aggression and irritability, which are common symptoms of many anxiety disorders to PTSD.

Start to Redemption

Considering that this is the moment that Kylo finally starts to question everything is such a great concept. He was toying with his beliefs when he kills his father. With his desire and push by snoke to become like his grandfather, he hoped it would help him to fully embrace the dark side, but look at where it lead him. He is so conflicted after, and even snoke knows, as he stated “and look at you, the deed split your spirit to the bone,” he acknowledges that part of the (possibly) reason Kylo lost to Rey because it was right after he killed Han, hence his clouded emotions as he’s feeling  conflicted on the inside.

He may even be suffering from some panic or paranoia. Or maybe he’s feeling as if he is going crazy. If you have ever experienced something like this, it would be very understandable. Killing his father more than likely struck something within him to trigger some of his PTSD, which would have all crashed down on him at once. It made him more reckless than normal and even made him so confused and unable to focus. He believed it was in the right to go after Rey and Finn, but in his blind rage, he was ultimately defeated by Rey. Many argue it’s because she was just stronger than him, but it is easy to consider that he could have been going through a psychological battle with himself at the time, from things like just having killed his father and starting to question where his true morals should be.

In his first scene in TLJ, Snoke brings his fears, claiming that he could very well be mistaken by putting faith in Kylo, to which he responds with “I’ve given everything I have to you, to the dark side,” After, Snoke continues to criticize him  to the point where Kylo shows the first form of true retaliation that we saw from him, only to be shocked by  his master in Discipline. When Snoke called him “A child in a mask,” I believe that this is where he finally came to terms that his father was right, and by him destroying his mask on the elevator, he then decided that things were not right anymore.

When he was in his TIE making an assault on the Resistance Fleet, he hesitates to kill his mother, but then opts not to. He was torn up about killing his father, but he could not do it to his mother. He could have so easily have killed her, but he disobeyed his mission to let his mother live. When the other TIEs blow of the bridge with Leia inside, it says it all in his facial expression that he is hurt, believing that she is gone.

His last straw was when he watched Snoke torture Rey and then reveal that he had created the connection between the two, he most likely felt betrayed by this. When he was ordered to kill Rey, it was his final decision that things had to change right there and then. He finally had the courage to fight against his Master, and killed him. This is where he is free, he doesn’t have to fear any discipline from Snoke or even being killed by him.

Though, the one thing that is not clear to him is what really happened when Luke tried to end him back at the Temple. He still holds that against Luke not knowing that he was about to refrain, and he believes that it is the final connection that he has to break to finally be free from all the mental torment.

Conclusion

Taking from my own experiences, I love Kylo Ren as a character. Sure I’ve had one great parent relationship, but look at where the bad relationship with my mother took me. Before you go saying that just because she was an alcoholic parent makes all these arguments not completely valid, you have to know that experiences do not have to be the same to result in similar things. She was a neglectful parent, she didn’t have much consideration for me. I know what it feels like to have a parent that doesn’t seem to care about you. I can’t imagine the things that he went through with having TWO parents seemingly neglecting him to some degree, as well as an uncle that in his last moments with Ben, didn’t see to have a love strong enough for him to keep himself from trying to end his life.

On another end, I can also understand what it’s like to be abused. While physical abuse was not too terrible, emotional abuse was what really got to me. She would do things from belittling me, to make me feel guilty for how things were with the family, and even going as far as to tell me to kill myself - and not care too much when I even tried. This is where I feel the most Empathy for a character like Kylo.  With the way that Snoke is shown to treat him, from belittling him to manipulating him, I can see where his life went wrong.

Again, it does not excuse some of his actions, but it should be taken into consideration all that he has been through. To those who do not believe that there is hope for Kylo, Stars there is. He has shown to realize his makes and expression some guilt to it, it is obvious or so hard to see for you. I believe that there is hope for him in episode 9 and I am wishing for an amazing redemption for him in the movie. Though, it should come at a price. It is he almost loses his life by sacrifice or he does die doing the right thing, I just know that it would be a great conclusion for his character.

Kylo Ren is a broken soul that needs to accept that he deserves to be loved and he has to learn to mend himself back together. No matter what it takes.

“Anxiety Disorders.” National Institute of Mental Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/anxiety-disorders/index.shtml.

“PTSD: National Center for PTSD.” Negative Coping and PTSD - PTSD: National Center for PTSD, 1 Jan. 2007, www.ptsd.va.gov/public/PTSD-overview/basics/what-is-ptsd.asp.

“PTSD: National Center for PTSD.” Negative Coping and PTSD - PTSD: National Center for PTSD, 15 May 2012, www.ptsd.va.gov/public/ptsd-overview/basics/symptoms_of_ptsd.asp.

“ .” Victim Blaming in Abuse and Relationships, www.abuseandrelationships.org/Content/Behaviors/authoritarian_style.html.

[cogentranting]

Here’s my breakdown of what I thought was going on with each member of the team in 6x09:

Oliver: I don’t think Oliver was wrong for spying on the team. Plain and simple. He knew one of them had betrayed him. He had no idea why or to what extent and he needed to find out. Spying on them was good option. Confronting them instead may have been able to show them who the witness was, but it also stood a good chance of yielding no results and costing him any chance of actually finding out who it was (because after that conversation spying wouldn’t work, because the witness would no not to do anything shady). And Dinah showing that she was lying to the team did make her the most reasonable suspect. Especially because she’s the one who Oliver is least acquainted with. They’ve spent very little time together, much of her background is still a mystery and she’s the newest member of the team. 

Then, Oliver jumps the gun and over reacts. He doesn’t have enough proof to accuse her as strongly as he does. BUT Oliver has been hit right in his weak spot. His trust issues. Oliver has been betrayed over and over by so many people. People he knew a lot better than he knows Dinah (or any of the team). And it’s been hammered into him so many times. Trust leads to being locked in a cage to small to sit up straight in. Trust leads to your friends being captured. Trust leads to your sister being stabbed. Trust leads to a the deaths of hundreds as the city is destroyed. And the idea of a member of the team betraying him, tied very directly in Evelyn’s betrayal (Felicity even mentions it specifically). Which is not something far in the past that he’s had time to heal from. Her initial betrayal was a year ago. And the second betrayal from her was something like six months ago. And that second betrayal (5x17) is key because it lead to one of the most traumatic moments in Oliver trauma-filled life: Evelyn’s betrayal is part of what broke him as he’s never been broken before. 

So yes, Oliver overreacted and was too harsh with Dinah. Because he’s scared of losing everything and he’s fighting down all those old trust issues surging up in him. He’s clinging to the few people he absolutely knows he can trust and that alone is huge for him.

And then when it turns out to be Rene he’s justifiably angry-- it’s a harsh betrayal. And kicking Rene off the team made perfect sense. But it also made sense that Oliver would forgive Rene because he was in a tough situation (one very similar to where Oliver has been before) and he made a very understandable choice.  Thea’s advice was really good, and she was right. And I think Oliver knew all of what she was saying already but just needed someone to say it out loud. BUT I wonder if maybe she pushed him to do it too soon. Because Rene’s betrayal is revealed and then he’s back on the team and then he’s off the team again all within about 24 hours. And I feel like maybe, if Oliver gave himself more than a few hours to be angry and betrayed before trying to forgive and work with Rene, then he wouldn’t have blown up at him again. Maybe Oliver needed a little more time to process emotionally.

Oliver’s reaction to Rene’s actions on the second mission are unfair. Rene not listening in the field is entirely different than his choice to betray Oliver. But again, Oliver is reacting out of fear and anger and deeply ingrained trust issues. And I don’t think he was given enough time to process.  He should forgive Rene. But I don’t think he needed to forgive Rene right that second. 

So yes, strategically, spying was fine. His responses to the team were fine in principle but amplified due to his ptsd (which is much better but not gone) to the point where he was not treating them right. Thought it was perfectly in character and I really liked seeing Oliver through it. 

Rene: I love Rene in general and I loved him through this episode. Being pressured in order to get Zoe back makes perfect sense for him and even though he made the wrong choice it was completely understandable. Rene alone among NTA didn’t have a problem with the spying because he knew it made sense and didn’t stem from a general lack of trust; it came from a very specific situation and the proof of a betrayal from one of them. He also was completely accepting of the consequences of his actions-- he wasn’t angry when Oliver kicked him off the team because he knew that was what he deserved. And he was humble and grateful for the second chance with the team. His main source of anger and frustration was that Oliver was trusting in his competence and that there was the element of being forgiven on a surface level but having it still held against him. Oliver being mad at him was fine, but not letting him do his job on the team was not. And even then, he really only left because Oliver made him. His actions and reactions were mature and completely suited to the situation. 

Dinah: I felt that Dinah was a little unreasonable. Being mad at someone suspecting you of betrayal when it is a known fact that there is a traitor and when you  have been caught lying and going behind the team’s back with a known criminal, when there is currently no evidence against any other team member, just seems like... “how dare you not trust in spite of everything pointing to the idea that you shouldn’t trust me”. If you are acting suspiciously and people get suspicious, you don’t really get to be mad at them. Now clearly she wasn’t the traitor and she should defend herself and I can understand it stinging a little bit. But it’s not nearly enough to make her completely lose faith in who Oliver is, and it certainly isn’t understanding of Oliver’s point of view, the position he’s in and the emotions behind his actions. And normally I would have expected more from her. I don’t actually think Oliver let her down in any significant way that would change the way she felt about being a part of the team. 

Now, if I step back and try to figure out what would cause her to overreact, in much the same way as Oliver’s history is causing him to lash out, I can kind of begin to grasp where she’s coming from. She’s feeling isolated- Vince is getting in her head, undermining her belief in Oliver and the team. She has a lot more insecurity than she lets on so the idea that the team might not fully trust her shook her a lot. Her reaction is very emotional and her judgment is somewhat clouded by her doubts about who she is and who she puts her trust in, awakened by Vince’s return. I also think her pride was hurt just a bit. 

Curtis: Curtis’s reaction was even more unreasonable. Because really the only thing done against him was the spying thing. And honestly, if Oliver and OTA just generally kept tabs on NTA, then I would feel that Curtis’s reaction was justified. But spying on the team wasn’t random suspicion. It only came about because Oliver completely had trusted the team and then it was proven to him that one of the team had betrayed that trust. And if it had been over anything less than the complete destruction of Oliver’s life then maybe the invasion of privacy would have warranted this reaction. And as someone very rationally driven, I would have thought Curtis would understand the need for Oliver’s actions. If anything it seems that Curtis’s anger would have to come from “why didn’t you trust me more than Rene and Dinah?” Because again, Oliver KNEW that one of the tree had betrayed him, so being suspicious of Curtis just means he didn’t elevate Curtis over the other two. And his indignation about the three of them being trusted less than Diggle and Felicity is really just an unrealistic expectation: yes, Oliver is going to trust his wife more than you. Always. He is going to trust Diggle, his best friend/brother, more than you. Always. and that’s not due to a lack of trust in Curtis/Rene/Dinah, that is a testament to the depth of his trust in Diggle and Felicity. 

But with Curtis they did establish a level of vulnerability to him in this episode. In the wake of his divorce he’s questioning everything about himself (he told Rene as much) and he’s really looking for stable relationships to hold on to. So the spying and the suspicion threatened the stability of his dynamic with the only real people he has right now. I doubt he would have left on his own, but when it became a choice between Oliver/Diggle/Felicity and Rene/Dinah, he chose the side that felt more stable and accepting of him. 

Diggle: Diggle is of course going to back Oliver: Oliver is the leader and the one in danger so he’s going to back his calls. And Diggle is aware that if there is a traitor it has to be one of NTA (because he knows its not him and it’s just absurd to think it would be Felicity). So the suspicion is going to be there. And he doesn’t really believe that Dinah is guilty [ and sidebar- that’s part of what led to the spying. Diggle Oliver and Felicity DID trust the team. They didn’t believe any of the three was capable of this. Which is why they have a hard time figuring out who was the witness] he doesn’t believe it’s Dinah but he goes with what Oliver says because Diggle doesn’t trust his own judgment right now, due to all the questionable choices he’s been making and the stuff he’s been going through. So he just follows Oliver in this case. 

Felicity: Felicity is very similar to Diggle, but in place of the self-doubt, you have a lot of fear. Felicity just said, her greatest fear in life is losing Oliver. And now someone is threatening to take Oliver away from her, possibly (likely) forever. So she’s going to do everything she can to try to figure out who it is so she can stop that and save her husband. So she’s prepared to spy, and she’s prepared to turn her back on whichever team member betrayed them. 

Really I don’t feel like any character was fully in the right or fully in the wrong. The episode was a really good character study. Each had their own particular vulnerabilities in play, either established in the episode or earlier this season. And it lead to this very real tension and emotional conflict. It was the kind of conflict that splits a team and I think that ultimately it’s not going to need to be Oliver apologizing to the team or the team apologizing to Oliver. It’s going to be all six of them working through their issues together. And it’s really going to cement them as  a family and prepare them to face the villain team. I like the way they set it up and I’m excited to see where it goes. 

[linenbagel28-blog]

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[insearchofthelighthouse]

Of Love and Misfits

Because of that, I want to list down every fight that I remember and every root cause we can't seem to solve. It's time to face every single one of that. I should have done this ages ago. I have to say good bye to running away when the same issues become an endless cycle.

• I seemed to have gotten jealous about everyone around you, including your family and friends, which forced you to think that I wanted you to be distant to them. I admit my wrong perception of love before - being possessive and territorial. Because you just let me go and allowed me to react like that every single time, I thought it was okay until the jealousy ate the both of us, until I can no longer control it. It became worse day after day. But I couldn't blame you. You didn't want us to have intense fights before. Sadly, they followed us until now. Looking back at it now, me being jealous about a family member or someone who is just a friend has gotten so out of control. I should have stopped the accusations and trusted you more than everything. I should have just allowed you to do whatever you want, knowing that you’re old enough to choose what is right. Not like you don’t hope for what’s best for us.

• It became a constant worry that I may be replaced anytime soon. But seeing how you've been hurt by the person I'm still beginning to change, I don't have grounds to tell you otherwise. I wanted to give you everything I can. I wanted to be whoever you needed. I wanted to be whatever you wanted. But I couldn't handle the pressure anymore and I ended up being the worst combination of them all. I thought I was helping you to be better and feel more. I thought I was letting you shine and be who you are. I thought I was fixing the broken, not damaging it further. Maybe, the assumptions I once had will become true. Maybe, we'll never, ever fix this. Maybe, you'll end up with one of those people I push you to. Maybe, we'll just be strangers passing by. Maybe, we're just too young for this.

• The sudden disappearances got on my nerves too. I did not know if it was timely that you vanish without a single word when I needed you the most. When I was sent to the emergency room, I set a part of me to still be with you. When I was battling with mental health issues, I ensured that I would try to be okay for you. I was always left wondering at nights if your feelings were valid and true. I did not know any better. I have always believed that words change time after time, so I shoved it here. I wasn't aware that it was a huge part of you to prioritize yourself over everything, and I hurt you too much that you couldn't come and feel safe here. I'm sorry.

• The inevitable changes brought by time fooled us to believe that everything will be just fine if we had each other, but that did not become the case. We were tested. Yes, we became strong, but we were also fragile. I don’t know how that’s possible. We were fed by the idea that we didn’t need anything else because we’ll always be here for each other. But we can’t. We just can’t face them this early.

• “Do not run back to what broke you,” It’s a well-known line but only brave people can apply it in their lives. And yes, we’re not brave. We’re cowards as we are clinging onto familiarity despite the hurting. It’s so easy to say that I’m done, that I don’t want this anymore, but looking at you, how can I leave you like this when I was the reason for your wounds and scars? How can I just leave you hanging and not do anything? For days that bled into months or even years, is leaving the best option? Should I just vanish without saying a word or should I say a few words, at least? Maybe, that bothered me until today. Because I’m anxious that today or tomorrow will be our last. “Letting go is sometimes easier than holding on,” It may be the right choice, but I doubt it is easier for anyone. How can a person just easily accept the fact that they’re back as strangers when they spent their lives trying so much for it to work out?

• Whenever you share, I get angry. I doubted your motives and choices. I could not trust how you would respond. When you don't share, I become furious. I wanted to know if there were more secrets to unfold without a warning. I begged for answers immediately. I thought it was right to let you know what I think about the situation so we would not encounter the same mistake again. I thought avoiding circumstances would makes us feel better. Nothing seemed to be right because every choice was tied to my fears and worries. I radiated a fragile energy before you that you didn't want me to get hurt and embraced all of it on your own. I instilled this idea that I don’t want to share the pain with you and you are strong enough to handle it all your own. But I had to learn how to conquer and fix my issues as well.

• I have always been worried about what you think every moment. I panic whenever you become silent and cold, not knowing you grew to be like that because of the past. Whenever I ask, it becomes invasive and too pushy, so we argue about it. Sometimes, there were things to be cold about. Other times, you just wanted to zone out. I could not distinguish what kind of mood you were in at that time. Perhaps, it was because the relationship was focused so much on me that I overlooked your different characteristics. 

• I made you my confidante that you grew worrisome about your flaws and insecurities. I even made it an issue when you were not doing anything but simply being yourself. No matter how many times I tell you that I love everything about you, the imperfections get left out. I wasn't lying when I said that I love you, but maybe, I love you because of the uplifting reasons. • I acted as if I was aware of everything you’ve been though both the positive and negative sides. However, I was wrong. The past years, I can mostly think of things that we both do, not the things you do alone, because we were inseparable and unbreakable. I got perplexed because I could not answer your interests and hobbies without involving my own. How could I not have noticed that before? Wasn’t that the first thing we should have done - get to know each other? 

• I wanted to know everything but I couldn't handle the truth. I wanted an update every single minute. I wanted to know who you were with, what you did, why you had to meet, and where you met. I thought that I was being sweet when I wanted to know how you were and asked about your day since I wouldn't mind telling them to you, but inquiring about things like that become an invasion of privacy and breach of trust. I wonder how many times I opened your account before just to prove my assumptions since I followed my instincts then. That was wrong. As I fed my desire to know what's happening, I just grew incredibly insane about everything. • It was a great fault to think that after talking about the problem, there would be reset button. We were not robots or machines to have such capability. I was wrong to have thought that we could forget what happened alongside the lessons that it brought. It was also wrong for me to think that things are easier at the other side.

• I became a fan of both the past and future but never seemed to have appreciated the present. I dug out our past arguments as if they were not settled. I envisioned a future with you but I couldn't enjoy the present. Maybe that was why it wasn't a part of you to think about it because we both doubted we'll last longer when we're being torn about by life's constant changes. • It was both a gift and curse to feel everything so deeply. My mind could only work properly if I plan things ahead and evade surprises. If something happens out of the blue, I get frustrated and hurt myself in the process of understanding that life is full of mysteries that I have yet to solve. You went with the flow of everything while I wanted to be the captain of the ship. In fear of unwanted memories, I hit the point of no return because of my hesitations. 

• I am very conscious about what other people think. I have been exceedingly vocal about our relationship that when it had the greatest plot twist, I shut off, because I was led on by my false beliefs about love. I became so busy writing the story of us to impress others that I left out the cries and sorrows that actually happen. Being conscious made me come up with irrational decisions. We hit that point wherein we were living for others, not for ourselves.

• I have become so prideful and overpowering because you put me on such a high pedestal. I became abusive. Maybe, there were times when I did unreasonable things because I knew you would always understand and accept. There were moments to test how you felt about me. There were times I hurt you intentionally. I was getting out of control. I was getting out of hand.

• Being a LGBTQ+ member, I couldn't accept it at first. I couldn't admit to others that I was in love with you, a girl I became close with in the Middle East. I denied it a couple of times and turned out to be a pressured individual who was not ready to come out of her shell. I couldn't tell my parents because they knew how I'd act when it comes to love. I was their combination.

• So I played around too well that I ended up swaying others because I wasn't sure of us. I remember forcing myself to like this K-pop cosplayer just based on his looks, not on his personality. I became obsessed with him when all I wanted to say was I liked you based on your personality. Then came another guy whom I flirted with. I befriended him and ran after, only to realize that we were just each other's summer pasttime. All I wanted to say was you were once my summer love, you are my present love, and you will always be my one great love. There were so many guys I met online because of instant messaging and organizations I was involved in. I became obsessed with proving that I was straight that I even had that brief moment of liking your brother when all I wanted to say was I can't run away from you. Later on, I realized that it wasn't the first time I became interested in a girl. I had fleeting desires to be with one even before I was young. Then, a soon-to-be classmate came and opened up about her sexual life. I tried to run away from it again, but I couldn't. While we were exchanging stories, we somehow felt a connection but it felt wrong since I wanted that special tie with you. But I couldn't let anybody know about that since she was a girl. A geeky nerd came next when we were organizing a feast for the batch. I became wary that he'll get lost when he found out I was just starting to realize that I was bi, so I went with the flow of conversations and tickled myself to fall for him when all I wanted was to admit these feelings for you. There came a train of random people who tried to make a move because of the booming image I had but I just played along when I should have been serious with you. I had crushes from here and there but I never intended to do something about it. I even had a suitor I think led on because I wanted to be with you, not him. I came across another woman who I saw myself in, like an older and hidden self I wanted to know. That began the wrong move to play around by figuring out if she'll break down her walls for me. I did like how she was, but I didn't feel the same excitement when I feel connected with you. And now, I've been linked with several people I don't even know if I'm forced to like or not. But, after all of that, even if I became a wreck finding that one person who'll give me an unconditional love, I realized it has been and will always be you all along. I have never wanted someone so badly in my life and every now and then, I just come back to you because you are the one I thought I'll end up with.

• Hating you for not coming out sooner. Before, I just wanted you to tell me if we had mutual feelings about each other. But I told you I hated those kinds of people. I hated my own kind becaused I hated myself for being so conscious about what others think. After knowing that we could be something more than friends, I pushed you to come out, even before I did. I demanded you to tell everyone you know, especially your friends, about what we have. I didn't seem to care if you were ready or not because I got too carried away by publicizing what we had and it wasn't a one-way street. I was just scared.

• My accusations must have been a reflection of mine. You being ashamed to tell everyone we were a couple.. I must have felt that for there were days I just wanted to tell them I wasn't in a relationship. You liking a friend.. I must have worried because that happened to me a couple of times. You running away from our problems.. I might have done the same, burying all the misunderstandings alongside their compromises. Everything, if I had just the right state of mind, might have turned out okay. We might not have reached the point that we hide things and plant hatred.

• I became spoiled that I have tantrums when I don't get what I want immediately. Be it answers, reasons, and replies. I tried to start out small by just asking simple questions about where you want to eat, what you want to do, and how your day was. I wanted you to take the wheel because I didn't want this to revolve around me. I needed you to decide on your own so I don't have to carry it alone. I thought of it wrongly. I thought that if simple questions could be answered, major demands could be met. That didn't work out for us as each question was passed back to me.

• My constant need for reassurances, the desire for me to know if I'm wanted or needed in their life, pressured you to be someone you're not. You're not always sweet and poetic. You're not always cheesy. You're not always inspired, especially when things are chaotic. Back when we were almost lovers, I fell so hard for your sweet side that I became too greedy about it. It came to the point that I made up scenarios so that they would come back. I just wanted us to stay on cloud nine. Even until now, you're forced to reassure me every now and then, and I couldn’t do the same. I apologize for being too selfish. • We had varying perceptions on love. Quite obvious, we see love differently, and what may be too much for you may just be enough for me. Vice versa. It is alright for me to get others involved, but you prefer making it just between us. We expected differently from each other, so we didn’t know what the right thing to do was. I fought my way out of all those misunderstandings because I believed that true love will conquer everything, but I forgot the necessary traits that are bundled with love, such as patience, selflessness, trust, and understanding. Maybe it was because of the lack of experience. Maybe it was because of our different memories. It just grew to be a wall between us - having different perspectives.  •  I was too clingy that I wanted every day to be about us when you wanted to chase after who you are. I was too demanding that I liked seeing pictures or posts about us on social media, even when you are not the tech-savy type. I even flooded you with tons of messages and fought with you when you’re busy with your own life. I’ve been too much for a person who just wanted enough. I’m sorry for that. Too much love turned out to be too much expectations. 

As much as I want to, I can't go back in time to change everything, alter my standpoints, and just become less toxic. I don't know if it's still possible at present, but I will try to lessen the burden on you. I'm still not sure how, yet I'll find out about it. For now, a few days of disappearance won’t hurt.

[polarisventuresnz]

Excerpts:

First of all there was the arrogant appropriation of users’ behavioural data – viewed as a free resource, there for the taking. Then the use of patented methods to extract or infer data even when users had explicitly denied permission, followed by the use of technologies that were opaque by design and fostered user ignorance.

And, of course, there is also the fact that the entire project was conducted in what was effectively lawless – or at any rate law-free – territory. Thus Google decided that it would digitise and store every book ever printed, regardless of copyright issues. Or that it would photograph every street and house on the planet without asking anyone’s permission

This has profound consequences for democracy because symmetry of knowledge translates into asymmetries of power.

But whereas most democratic societies have at least some degree of oversight of state surveillance, we currently have almost no regulatory oversight of its privatised counterpart. This is intolerable.

And it won’t be easy to fix because it requires us to tackle the essence of the problem – the logic of accumulation implicit in surveillance capitalism. That means that self-regulation is a nonstarter. “Demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists,” says Zuboff, “or lobbying for an end to commercial surveillance on the internet is like asking old Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand. It’s like asking a giraffe to shorten its neck, or a cow to give up chewing. These demands are existential threats that violate the basic mechanisms of the entity’s survival.”

Historians call it the “conquest pattern”, which unfolds in three phases: legalistic measures to provide the invasion with a gloss of justification, a declaration of territorial claims, and the founding of a town to legitimate the declaration.

The first surveillance capitalists also conquered by declaration. They simply declared our private experience to be theirs for the taking, for translation into data for their private ownership and their proprietary knowledge. They relied on misdirection and rhetorical camouflage, with secret declarations that we could neither understand nor contest.

Surveillance capitalism originated in a second declaration that claimed our private experience for its revenues that flow from telling and selling our fortunes to other businesses.

As it turns out his vision perfectly reflected the history of capitalism, marked by taking things that live outside the market sphere and declaring their new life as market commodities.

In my early fieldwork in the computerising offices and factories of the late 1970s and 80s, I discovered the duality of information technology: its capacity to automate but also to “informate”, which I use to mean to translate things, processes, behaviours, and so forth into information. This duality set information technology apart from earlier generations of technology: information technology produces new knowledge territories by virtue of its informating capability, always turning the world into information. The result is that these new knowledge territories become the subject of political conflict. The first conflict is over the distribution of knowledge: “Who knows?” The second is about authority: “Who decides who knows?” The third is about power: “Who decides who decides who knows?”

Surveillance capitalists were the first movers in this new world. They declared their right to know, to decide who knows, and to decide who decides. In this way they have come to dominate what I call “the division of learning in society”, which is now the central organising principle of the 21st-century social order, just as the division of labour was the key organising principle of society in the industrial age.

Larry Page grasped that human experience could be Google’s virgin wood, that it could be extracted at no extra cost online and at very low cost out in the real world. For today’s owners of surveillance capital the experiential realities of bodies, thoughts and feelings are as virgin and blameless as nature’s once-plentiful meadows, rivers, oceans and forests before they fell to the market dynamic. We have no formal control over these processes because we are not essential to the new market action. Instead we are exiles from our own behaviour, denied access to or control over knowledge derived from its dispossession by others for others. Knowledge, authority and power rest with surveillance capital, for which we are merely “human natural resources”. We are the native peoples now whose claims to self-determination have vanished from the maps of our own experience.

While it is impossible to imagine surveillance capitalism without the digital, it is easy to imagine the digital without surveillance capitalism. The point cannot be emphasised enough: surveillance capitalism is not technology.  

It is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate us. These processes are meticulously designed to produce ignorance by circumventing individual awareness and thus eliminate any possibility of self-determination. As one data scientist explained to me, “We can engineer the context around a particular behaviour and force change that way… We are learning how to write the music, and then we let the music make them dance.”

Democracy has slept, while surveillance capitalists amassed unprecedented concentrations of knowledge and power

This power to shape behaviour for others’ profit or power is entirely self-authorising. It has no foundation in democratic or moral legitimacy, as it usurps decision rights and erodes the processes of individual autonomy that are essential to the function of a democratic society. The message here is simple: Once I was mine. Now I am theirs.

These dangerous asymmetries are institutionalised in their monopolies of data science, their dominance of machine intelligence, which is surveillance capitalism’s “means of production”, their ecosystems of suppliers and customers, their lucrative prediction markets, their ability to shape the behaviour of individuals and populations, their ownership and control of our channels for social participation, and their vast capital reserves. We enter the 21st century marked by this stark inequality in the division of learning: they know more about us than we know about ourselves or than we know about them. These new forms of social inequality are inherently antidemocratic.

At the same time, surveillance capitalism diverges from the history of market capitalism in key ways, and this has inhibited democracy’s normal response mechanisms. One of these is that surveillance capitalism abandons the organic reciprocities with people that in the past have helped to embed capitalism in society and tether it, however imperfectly, to society’s interests. First, surveillance capitalists no longer rely on people as consumers. Instead, supply and demand orients the surveillance capitalist firm to businesses intent on anticipating the behaviour of populations, groups and individuals. Second, by historical standards the large surveillance capitalists employ relatively few people compared with their unprecedented computational resources. General Motors employed more people during the height of the Great Depression than either Google or Facebook employs at their heights of market capitalisation. Finally, surveillance capitalism depends upon undermining individual self-determination, autonomy and decision rights for the sake of an unobstructed flow of behavioural data to feed markets that are about us but not for us.

This antidemocratic and anti-egalitarian juggernaut is best described as a market-driven coup from above: an overthrow of the people concealed as the technological Trojan horse of digital technology. On the strength of its annexation of human experience, this coup achieves exclusive concentrations of knowledge and power that sustain privileged influence over the division of learning in society. It is a form of tyranny that feeds on people but is not of the people. Paradoxically, this coup is celebrated as “personalisation”, although it defiles, ignores, overrides, and displaces everything about you and me that is personal.

We are trapped in an involuntary merger of personal necessity and economic extraction, as the same channels that we rely upon for daily logistics, social interaction, work, education, healthcare, access to products and services, and much more, now double as supply chain operations for surveillance capitalism’s surplus flows.

The result is that the choice mechanisms we have traditionally associated with the private realm are eroded or vitiated. There can be no exit from processes that are intentionally designed to bypass individual awareness and produce ignorance, especially when these are the very same processes upon which we must depend for effective daily life. So our participation is best explained in terms of necessity, dependency, the foreclosure of alternatives, and enforced ignorance.

While there is no simple five-year action plan, much as we yearn for that, there are some things we know. Despite existing economic, legal and collective-action models such as antitrust, privacy laws and trade unions, surveillance capitalism has had a relatively unimpeded two decades to root and flourish. We need new paradigms born of a close understanding of surveillance capitalism’s economic imperatives and foundational mechanisms.”

For example, the idea of “data ownership” is often championed as a solution. But what is the point of owning data that should not exist in the first place? All that does is further institutionalise and legitimate data capture. It’s like negotiating how many hours a day a seven-year-old should be allowed to work, rather than contesting the fundamental legitimacy of child labour. Data ownership also fails to reckon with the realities of behavioural surplus. Surveillance capitalists extract predictive value from the exclamation points in your post, not merely the content of what you write, or from how you walk and not merely where you walk. Users might get “ownership” of the data that they give to surveillance capitalists in the first place, but they will not get ownership of the surplus or the predictions gleaned from it – not without new legal concepts built on an understanding of these operations.

So what is to be done? In any confrontation with the unprecedented, the first work begins with naming. Speaking for myself, this is why I’ve devoted the past seven years to this work… to move forward the project of naming as the first necessary step toward taming. My hope is that careful naming will give us all a better understanding of the true nature of this rogue mutation of capitalism and contribute to a sea change in public opinion, most of all among the young.

[catalogado]

Did you install EFF's brilliant Privacy Badger or any other smart HTTP Cookie management tool? Or did you simply pick the privacy preference in your browser that ignores all third-party cookies? Did many websites you visit annoy you with permission-to-use-cookies pop-ups because of European legislation?

Guess what, it's all been useless.

Hamburg university researchers have examined closely how web browsers implement so-called TLS session resumption and how the top million popular websites make use of that feature. They found that 80% of websites make a correct use, unsuitable for tracking repeat visitors — just resuming an existing session within the last ten minutes.

Unfortunately though, Google is present on 80% of these websites in form of Analytics, Fonts or other third-party inclusions. And among 10% of sites that do not respect reasonable resumption times, Google sticks out as one of the most greedy ones — it allows for a web browser to stay offline for over a day, and still be recognized as the same web browser the next day. Considering that it is nearly impossible to surf the web without accessing some Google content, this means that Google can track all your surfing habits without any need for HTTP Cookies!

As Facebook isn't as pervasively present in all of the web, it went even further. It is enough for you to visit any website bearing a Like button every second day to allow Facebook to profile you, even if you never dreamt of logging into that service. Could it be our researchers just caught these companies with their hands deep in the cookie jar (pun intended)? For how long have they been collecting user data this way?

TLS stands for 'Transport Layer Security'. It is the protocol standard formerly known as SSL that powers the encryption in HTTPS. With the post-Snowden initiative of encrypting all web traffic, we inadvertedly introduced a new method of bulk surveillance.

The problem of TLS session tracking isn't news, actually. Back in 2010 fippo aka Philipp Hancke wrote a proof-of-concept implementation of such a tracking mechanism while he was refining the TLS implementation in psyced. We discussed the problem in the chatroom, but failed to make it public, thinking it was obvious. And back then only high security applications like banking and shopping were using HTTPS. Stuff you log into with all your data, anyway. Using encryption just to protect the privacy of regular websurfing was considered paranoid.

Eight years later, everyone in the business seems keen to point out that TLS version 1.3 will finally address this issue by encrypting session data, but that would only protect us from passive observers in the network — it doesn't help if the server itself is trying to figure out who we are.

Only those of us who have systematically usedTorbrowser or blocked Faceboogle domains on their firewalls or routers are exempted from yet another privacy failure. And those who happen to shutdown their computers completely each day, or otherwise maintain a habit of restarting their browser each day anew.

Even Tor users that have been surfing the web using any browser but the appropriate Torbrowser must now face the evidence that Google may not know where they were physically located, but it was granted data about most of the websites visited, possibly over the course of years. A scoundrel who thinks they would actually collect that data and use it according to their business model (like they have done before).

This time the breach is particularly painful, because it is affecting those people who thought they had taken measures against it. How many more times will we try our luck with band aids and hotfixes rather than demand an Internet that just cannot spy on usby design? We should demand this from technologists, but most of all from politicians. And we should go to the streets bearing banners. This is no small thing. We are losing our democracies.

Consider also how the Snowden revelations informed us that the Google cookie was NSA's way to identify targets, about a decade ago. Since Cookie filtering became commonplace, the NSA certainly needed new ways of identifying people on the net. To comply with the Freedom Act, the NSA still has PRISM running and companies such as Facebook and Google are simply obliged to collaborate. We may have no proof, but we know the current state of legislation. NSA just wouldn't be doing its job, if it wasn't exploiting this loophole.

Thanks to the Hamburg researchers for systematically looking into this problem and exposing the corporations that silently may have been poking fun at our anti-Cookie legislations and protection tools. If this breach is now uncovered, it only means that there are dozens more this broken Internet is capable of, that we haven't become aware of.

Expect to be tracked anyway, in ways you never conceived of. Don't let this carry on. Speak up. Do something.

—lynX.

Appendix

Did you turn on that 'Block dangerous and deceptive content' feature in Firefox' security tab? It works by downloading a database from Google when you start the browser. Occasionally a website you visit can appear like it is contained in that database, so your browser will ask Google again to make sure the website isn't in there. In practice, your browser may consult Google fairly often behind your back. Theissue was raised in 2006, that 'Safe Browsing' shouldn't send the regular Google "PREF" Cookie as if the user had intentionally wanted to visit Google, but odd argumentations made sure that the bug never got fixed, possibly related to NSA's mission to keep entire humanity in check and depending on "PREF" for that purpose. Unfortunately even GDPR doesn't impede this business, as the user "intentionally" installed Firefox by "free will", as if they knew what they are getting themselves into. This whole ideology of people making choices while technology does whatever it wants behind their backs, as if the precondition of transparency and understanding could ever be met, is utter madness making dystopias come true. Thanks Ashkan, lixtra and others.

In 1996 I was worried about HTTP ETags becoming a tool for tracking, They still are today. And legislators are once again completely unaware of them. Thanks, Chris Morgan.

HTTPS session identifiers can be disabled in Mozilla products manually by setting 'security.ssl.disable_session_identifiers' in about:config. Thanks, gruez. Torbrowser simply has this and dozens of other settings configured to put privacy and security first.

Thanks toast0 for details on TLS 1.3.

Also breaking news: activists and local population have requisited the Google Campus in Berlin. No wait, police already intervened.

Google and Mastercard Cut a Secret Ad Deal to Track Retail Sales. Google found the perfect way to link online ads to store purchases: credit card data. "People don’t expect what they buy physically in a store to be linked to what they are buying online.”

Questions & Answers

“"Those session resumption tokens save you redownloading 1- 10kb of certificates every fresh connection and the multiple round trips for the TLS handshake. Its a bandwidth and latency optimization." says tlarkworthy.”

So should we always trade in our privacy and civil rights for performance optimizations? And did anyone even ask us? Is it enough if some of us opt out, if in the end result most of humanity becomes individually predictable and easily subject of micro-invasive mass manipulation? Understand how these performance optimizations nibble at the foundations of what's left of democracy?

“_jal suggests, "This is why you block the surveillance shops' IP space. They are professional panty-sniffers, dependent on doing so for their dinner. Like trolls and narcissists, your only value to them is instrumental. Assuming you care about these things, communicating with them in any way is against your interests. The internet is a much nicer, safer place when you blackhole the commercial-Stasi-wannabes."”

Would be nifty to have ready to use tools and configs for average people to block all webservers that abuse HTTPS sessions for surveillance. Oh wait, the folks from 'Occupy Google' have a list of recommendations. Then again, it doesn't help humanity if only a bunch of aware intellectuals opt out.

“stubish says, "Google needs to be perceived as the best place to spend your advertising budget. What business case is there for Google to work hard at tracking people, defeating anti-tracking measures?"”

Faceboogle have become the best places to spend your advertising budget because despite the high price they can target just the people you need. And most of all you can't afford not to do this type of unethical surveillance targeting, because all your competitors are doing it. This creates a massive market distortion in which Faceboogle are the two mind-reading monopolists. Since this approach isentirely unethical and of no value for society, it would be reasonable to bring back equal conditions for advertising by making mass surveillance impossible again, as it was before 1995.

“yuhong asks, "I'm under the impression Firefox intends to do DNS over HTTPS with Cloudflare shortly. If X and Y are Cloudflare fronted domains, can they now pair sessions? I'm guessing a DOH session queries for domain X and immediately an HTTPS connection appears for X, then queries for Y and another appears at Y. Then the whole DOH session becomes identifiable once Cloudflare fronts any service with email sign-in."”

Sounds very realistic to me and worth a closer examination, maybe in form of an upcoming university study?

More trivia on the issue of so-called 'Safe Browsing':

“manicdee illustrates: "You issue quest on hash A then hash B. Google guesses that because of other activity it has seen today, visits to a site marked by hash A followed by visits to site marked hash B means you are following a link from Alex Jones’ blog to a flat earth holocaust denial web site, and thus prepares to serve your IP address ads for tin foil hats and prepper magazines. The chances of your traffic pattern of hash A then hash B colliding with, say, my browsing of the MLP fan club and following a link to cosplay photos from Dragon Con are pretty slim, even though the MLP fan club URL hash collided with the Alex Jones blog hash. Google aren’t just looking at the one thing you viewed, they are following you everywhere."”

How likely is it, that visiting two partitions of the worldwide web subsequently is giving clues on which specific websites you probably were visiting? And even if in a certain percentage of cases this assertion is wrong, does it matter commercially? Or is a certain percentage of algorithmic failure irrelevant to Google, just not irrelevant to you? Will it have political consequences in your life, if you are stored as an Alex Jones visitor when you are actually just an MLP fan? Sounds like another fine case for a scientific research paper to be written — to find out if 'Safe Browsing' is a threat to liberty even if cookies and TLS session identificators were eliminated.

Last Change: 2018-09-10

Further discussion on Ycombinator (We are not endorsing that site, it's just that the attention economy chooses its own data agglomeration centers).

[tugadar]

Launch HN: ElectroNeek (YC W20) – Automatically find and automate routine work Hey Hacker News! We are Sergey Yudovsky, Dmitry Karpov and Mike Rozhin, founders of ElectroNeek ( https://bit.ly/2CikhgW ), an automation platform for repetitive business tasks. The product we build let users design software ‘robots’ that imitate human actions in apps and websites, and deploy them to eliminate routine work. Our software also spots patterns of repetitive processes that users do in business app and suggests what to automate in the first place. Some of you may have heard of a technology niche called Robotic Process Automation, or RPA. Basically, it’s about automating user actions on Graphic User Interface level, so no API is needed to automate any type of repetitive work on the computer. It has been known for 20+ years in the software testing space but emerged as a business process automation tool over the last decade, getting big momentum in Enterprise (95% of Fortune 500 use it for back-office task automations). If you know what Selenium is and how it automates work in browsers you may think of RPA that is a Selenium on steroids that can work in any desktop or SaaS app. Basic RPA bots interact with app interfaces using mouse and keyboard, so if some repetitive process can be described by an instruction it can be automated (in theory) with RPA. There are a few fundamental issues with GUI-level automation (like, how should a programmed bot behave if the interface has changed?) but the major limit historically has been the complexity of RPA bot development and administration. The biggest benefits of RPA come from automating complex tasks, sometimes even end-to-end jobs across multiple pieces of software and websites. As you might expect, this approach to automation works great until it doesn't, and then someone has to step in with duct tape, a.k.a. write glue code to stick the pieces together, especially when it comes to variables, cycles and unstructured data (a lot of real business documents). RPA turned into something that business users can not use without having coding experience, which defeats the whole purpose. In 2016-2018, Sergey and Dmitry, long time friends, separately got into RPA consulting business on two different continents. Sergey ran his own boutique firm that worked with big banks and natural resource companies in Eastern Europe and Dmitry was in charge of RPA branding and marketing strategy at EY’s Americas business. The idea to build new software in the space came from Sergey’s inbound marketing pipeline – many mid-market companies understood the benefits of RPA, attended Sergey’s firm demos of RPA bots in action, but walked away from implementations because they haven’t been able to afford them due to limited in-house IT resources and absence of a budget for consultants. ‘Too complex and expensive’ - the most common feedback of such potential clients who in fact were underserved by major vendors and integrators. To move forward with making RPA easier for such customers, Sergey and Dmitry brought in Mike, Dmitry’s college friend with a major in mathematics and career in cloud architecture. We got some momentum among small banks, insurance companies and other companies with relatively tiny IT teams. But then we realized that there are obstacles with this market. The biggest problem lies in finding what to automate in the first place. There is lots of manual repetition going on in companies that people just don't notice. Managers and IT often understand the RPA tech and its capabilities, but struggle to find where to start. An even bigger obstacle to automation is the need to learn complex tools and in fact, the need to code in order to automate significant routines. It turns out that navigating desktop or website interface requires more complex logic than taking data from SaaS A to SaaS B (the land of Zapier). Over the time we adopted a mantra ‘if it can be done with a mouse only, without touching the keyboard, it should be automatable in this way'. At present, about 25% of our bot developers are non-IT. Typically their role in a company is related to working with analysis or operations data. They benefit from automating data extraction or data entry tasks and are motivated enough to learn a new tool to make their own life easier. These ‘Citizen Automator’s’ have a very simple decision-making process when they evaluate automation opportunities: will I get back the time I invest in designing a workflow? What are the time gains? If so, I invest my time and request a budget for a solution. Our big insight about how to solve these obstacles came from the simple idea that ‘robots’ that execute automations also have all the capabilities to passively monitor how users interact with different interface elements, mouse, keyboard, etc. Why not let the ‘robot’ look at what you do in the first place, and attempt to find whether you run the same process repetitively, even if runs are spaced in time. Normally this could be seen as an invasion of privacy but, unlike with time trackers, the purpose of this monitoring is not a control of how people spend their working hours but the voluntarily search for automation possibilities for giving time back to people. From that we built a simple repetitive-actions analytics tool that any users, regardless of IT experience, can use out of the box. Users across a company can download a client that passively monitors how they interact with different interface elements (forms, buttons) across whitelisted applications and websites, looks at clipboard frequency, mouse and keyboard usage patterns. On the back end, the cloud portion of the software identifies repetitive patterns and estimates potential (in hours) for automation on the level of software, users, and the organization. For instance, if a user often switches between 2 application windows and uses Ctrl+C/V in each iteration, this is a pattern of repetitive process that can be automated with RPA. The platform counts specific automation opportunities (like copy-pasting, repetitive click-throughs) to give a better sense on what exact routine it identified. These types of job are common for RPA automations. Even more common is the case of clicking through a legacy system to process a transaction (for instance, underwriting insurance) – users click on interface element on the same screens in the same orders for 30+ times and don’t even think of accelerating the clickthrough with automation. Or accounting case – many CPAs charge clients for manually uploading ledger account into cloud accounting software, taking data from excel to web forms. ‘Robots’ will ‘eat’ such tasks. Once the repetitive patterns have been identified, it’s time to start automating. Designated users can build bots with no code/low-code. Finding and eliminating inefficiencies is a pretty addictive process. When you have an automation tool in your hands you definitely look very differently at how your teams spend their working hours. On the business side of the house, we adopted SaaS model and charge clients for the access to process discovery and automation suite that has both web and downloadable parts. We eat our own dog food a lot: all of us, from sales and marketing to product, have our own set of automated workflows. In sales, we use bots to automate going to LinkedIn Sales Navigator to enrich contact lists, to check emails in these lists against spam databases (using tool named Scrapp) and then to build email sequences in Gmail, bypassing # of sent emails limit set by CRM vendor on our plan. We're really happy to get to this point and share our story here, thank you for reading about it! Please let us know your thoughts and questions in the comments. July 8, 2020 at 03:30PM

[karenlopez19857]

Pop-Up Blockers

A ‘pop-up blocker’, also known as ‘pop-up killer’, is a program that protects against pop-ups from being shown in a user’s web internet browser. Pop-up blockers operate in a number of means. While some close the window prior to it shows up, others disable the command that calls the pop-up, and yet others alter the home window’s resource HTML. One issue with pop-up blockers is that they can not constantly distinguish in between an undesirable pop-up window and one that is user-requested. That is simply a small issue. Prior to you make a decision whether you wish to combat the ad-blocking fight, you truly need to understand the hazards that you are dealing with. 

 Let’s simply start from the start: Pop-ups are those aggravating windows that get in the method of us checking out the internet sites that we desire to see. The most sensible explanation for this is that even people that detest web advertisements concede that the explosion in web advertising has funded a no-cost Web rich in material. 

 Albeit a lot of web internet users would, to some degree, agree on the demand of ad as a monetary resource for Internet-based firms that fundamentally operate as material companies, the brand-new online advertising techniques and also methods that some marketers have been using show up to go across the line between what is reasonable and what is not; in other words, what can be thought about a ‘fair quantity of advertising’ and also what is just an ‘underhanded usage of marketing as a means to get into individuals’s eyeballs, minds and also lives’. You would be extremely naïve if you assumed that the newest generation of online ads just rests timidly on a web page carrying an identifying tag that claims ‘Advertising. Rather, the bulk of adware stealthily impersonate ads as non-commercial web content or bombard our eyeballs with pyrotechnic extra. 

 There are Common Banner Advertisements, consisting of new formats such as the up and down oriented high-rise. These stay inside the key internet browser home window. Second, there are the pop-up and pop-under ads. Instead of typical banner ads, these show up in brand-new web browser windows, normally removed of toolbars and menus, and either cover your initial internet browser window or conceal beneath it. Third, there are Interstitials, which are advertisements that show up after you click a link however prior to you see the following web page, and Pop-up Transitionals, a type of advertisement that plays in a separate window between two pages of content. 4th, there are Superstitials, an extremely progressed ad varieties which move across the face of a website, as if they were computer animations predicted on a piece of glass over the web page. Most awful of all are the Mouse-Trappers as well as High-Speed Spawners, so called since they break your web browser’s Back switch and/or disable the Close box as well as commonly likewise have the ability to duplicate home windows much faster than you can get rid of them. 

 A lot of legit internet site try to stay clear of using misleading advertisements to get clicks yet some allow the technique banner, that is, an advertisement that mimics a dialog box. When you click its ALRIGHT switch to disregard a system message, you are immediately attracted right into a spiral of other web ads: a complete headache! There’s also adware like TopText, which skulks onto your system when you mount specific shareware or free software programs and also after that generates its very own pop-ups to compete with those released by the websites you go to. 

 Given that a future without frustrating turn up advertisements does not appear to be a really viable possibility, if you intend to place an end to the chaos on your desktop you can either make use of ad-blocking software to eliminate most advertisements that appear in your internet browser, or you could apply some ad-blocking strategies without making use of ad-blocking software program. If you choose the 2nd choice, all you have to do is shut off all graphics, Java, JavaScript, and Flash in your browser - and give up almost all the interactivity as well as usefulness of your web experience while doing so. That is why software application that selectively gets rid of the aggravating ads is possibly the smartest service. 

 There are a variety of ad-blocking software alternatives offered in the market today, both cost-free as well as spent for. Amongst the totally free software that was checked and also has actually verified to be relatively effective are 12Ghosts Popup-Killer as well as 12Ghosts StopMessengerAds. Additionally, shareware such as STOPzilla!, ABF Internet Traveler Devices, AdBeGone PopUp Killer as well as CoffeeCup PopUp Blocker have obtained some good reviews. Free pop-up blockers, such as STOPzilla and also Panicware, are readily offered for download. Both the Yahoo and google toolbars consist of the capacity to obstruct pop-ups. That capability is also allowed by default in Microsoft’s XP Solution Pack Two (SP2) settings for Web Traveler.  

 The majority of ad-blocking programs function as specialized proxy servers. Once operating on your COMPUTER, they analyze the addresses that your web browser demands, examine every one versus the entrances in an often updated database of advertisement server addresses, and then drop ask for ad content. Some additionally depend on pattern matching to try to find windows and photos that match understood shapes and sizes of ads. Leaving inconvenience apart, there are various other good factors to fight back. Blocking advertisements releases up precious bandwidth and can safeguard your personal privacy. Advertisements take some time to tons, as well as they usually hinder of what you are actually curious about while browsing on the web. Because lots of advertisement web servers place cookies on your computer, ad companies are able to track your browsing. These business claim that the feature of many cookies they establish is to manage the type and also quantity of advertisements you receive. Yet since the larger ad services extend a broad array of web sites, ad-related cookies can also give ad business a great deal of insight right into your web searching choices. And also this is a critical issue given that you, as a lot of us customers, have never ever explicitly consented to be complied with on the web. If you intend to learn more regarding your privacy civil liberties, check out the www.Anti-Spam-League.org site. This organization has a great deal of important information on personal privacy, spam, identification burglary and other typical Net misuses. Become a free participant by going to www.Anti-Spam-League.org. 

 There is the debate relating to whether using ad-supported internet sites is providing the implied commitment to tolerate and sustain online ads. Rationally, advertisers assume that the implied agreement appears to be acceptable to most customers and web sites since without advertisements, the Internet as we recognize it would certainly vanish really quick. 

 Marketers make use of these intrusive methods simply due to the fact that they work. Sad yet real. Several of the most invasive ads have the regrettable impact of rapidly catching customers’ focus and as a result, pop-up blocking software is obtaining increasingly more prominent these days. Even Microsoft revealed ultimately of 2003 that the brand-new Internet Explorer will include popup advertisement blocker. Normally, it is foreseeable that popup marketers are most likely to start creating software application to bypass it. In April of 2004 Falk eSolutions AG, an international company of ad distribution and also administration options, launched a new advertisement targeting alternative to instantly spot pop-up blocker software on individuals’ computers as well as quickly convert pop-up and pop-under supply to alternate formats for optimum delivery to those users. Our belief is that as new popup-blocking software program comes out, extra hostile pop-up display methods are likely to arise to bypass the protection. As a last thought, no anti-ad energy functions faultlessly; however without advertisements, you would certainly not be annoyed so frequently with undesired spot announcements, and web pages would definitely load much faster! 

 If you wish to learn more regarding this as well as various other relevant topics, take a look at www.Anti-Spam-League.org. This company provides totally free subscription and also the possibility to access a wide amount of appropriate info on personal privacy, spam, email misuse, Net scams, responsible advertising and marketing and also several various other subjects.

[consciousenneagram]

The Truth about Trump's Enneagram Type

I’m going to be completely honest here, I shouldn’t be writing this article. I should be working on my book, or doing laundry, or walking my dog. But there has been a disturbing trend in the Enneagram community over the last few weeks that has me frustrated to no end, and since no one seems to be saying the things that have been on my mind, I guess that just leaves it up to me.

Several very prominent teachers in the Enneagram community have taken to typing the 45th president of the United States, and after reading their articles, I have to say, they’re all wrong.

I respect these teachers very, very much, and to their credit their cases are strong and well thought out, but (and there’s a huge but here) no one knows anyone else’s type. EVER. END OF STORY. Sure, their articles are written with heavy disclaimers at the beginning about how we can’t know, and how this isn’t to stereo type the president, and how they could be wrong, etc. I’m not saying they’re all wrong about what type they assume 45 to be, what I’m saying is they’re wrong for trying to type him in the first place.

Why we don’t type other people:

It may be the most important and most ignored rule in the Enneagram community: don’t type other people. I must admit, I’m as guilty as anyone of this, but thinking to myself that someone may be mistyped, or that a friend has some qualities that greatly resemble a certain type is wildly different than trying to type a person who might be the most divisive character in our county’s short history. No matter who it is though, trying to type another person is always a bad idea. There are three main reasons why we should never type other people (or at very least, keep our thoughts to ourselves):

It takes away their opportunity to come to it on their own terms. This is soooo huge. The way we come into contact with information will greatly affect how we use that information. By simply putting in answers and having a computer spit our an answer, we sell ourselves short. The Enneagram is meant to be a tool for personal and spiritual development, it’s meant to be used as a map that can lead us on a transformational journey, and discovering our type is a large part of that journey. If someone is just labeled as a type, they could spend the rest of their lives believe that’s all they’re capable of being, instead of embarking on a journey toward so much more. By typing celebrities and well-known public figures, we make the assumption that they won’t ever be interested in using the Enneagram for their own growth and transformation. We turn those people into nothing more than cardboard cutouts of themselves and rob them of the opportunity to use a tool that could change their life. If the Enneagram teaches us anything it’s that we must learn to see more of people’s humanity, not less. Typing celebrities like this robs them of their humanity.

We can only see people through the lens of our own type. I have a dear friend who’s mother is a 9 (self-reported!). After learning about the other types, this 9 was certain her daughter (who is very much a 7 with strong 6 wing) was an 8. When my friend relayed this to me, I laughed and said, “To a 9, everyone seems like an 8.” While that may not be exactly true in all cases, 9’s extreme aversion to engaging in conflict would make even the average person seem like someone who actively enjoys conflict. Each of us in our types and in our personal experiences have lenses like this that skew the way we see the world. And while our work in with the Enneagram helps us to understand this and shift our perspective, we always be looking through our own rose-colored-glasses and won’t be able to see others clearly.

It’s an invasion of privacy. The Enneagram isn’t a personality typology based simply on behavior, its focus is on motivation. Not only that, it details so much of our personal trauma and the ways we tried to cope with it. To make assumptions about a person on this level is deeply intrusive, and quite frankly offensive. Long story short, we shouldn’t be typing anyone. We should be treating this tool and what it illuminates with in us with the respect they deserve. By simply throwing around numbers and types, we cheapen the Enneagram and what it’s capable of, not to mention the possibility of deeply wounding another person.

So what about Trump?

There are plenty of arguments for why we should know Trump’s type, and why his type matters, and I’d like to address a couple of them here and explain why they’re misguided.

“Knowing Trump’s type will help us understand how he came to power.” I love the Enneagram y’all, I really do, but I also know that it has it’s place. And this is not the place for the Enneagram (or at least, not the personality typology piece of the Enneagram). Knowing Trump’s type won’t give us any more insight into how he came to power than we had before we knew his type. And to be honest, we don’t really need it. Trump used money, fear, and the Russian government to make it into the White House. He is nothing more than a symptom of a much larger issue in our country and in our society. In so many ways, he’s a pawn or a scapegoat, his personality doesn’t actually matter. AND, to top it off, knowing his type won’t help us understand how he came to power, because there’s no way to know for sure what his type is unless he does the work himself to find out. All it is is speculation and conjecture, simply an intellectual exercise with little bearing on reality.

“Knowing Trump’s type will help us have compassion for him.” WRONG. Let me explain: We don’t gain compassion for other people by knowing more about them. This is a common misconception in the self-awareness/self-help community. Understanding and knowing are head-based faculties, while compassion is heart-based. Compassion for others doesn’t come from knowing more about them, it comes from knowing more about ourselves. As we learn more about ourselves, and do the work of exploring and reintegrating our own shadows, we learn to have true compassion for other people, because we understand how difficult the journey really is. If our goal is to have more compassion for Trump knowing his type won’t help us get there, only doing our own work on ourselves will bring us the ability to see him in a truly compassionate light.

“He is a prime example of the unhealthy elements of type XYZ.” I understand there may be value in seeing a real life example of the unhealthy characteristics of a given type, but if the person hasn’t self-identified as that type, we’re really only seeing what we want to see, and this can end up hurting a lot of people. Also, as a community, this sentiment is dangerous for us and the real transformative work of the Enneagram. There’s no way that Trump is going to change, we have no way of making that happen, but there are millions of Americans who we could reach and who’s lives could be changed that are still supportive of Trump. By simply labeling Trump (or any other celebrity) as the pathological extreme of a type, we cut ourselves off from the people who might actually be open to using this powerful tool to build more self-awareness and compassion in their lives.

What’s at stake:

Trump is an incredibly divisive character, as well as an extremely unstable one. Some view his instability has a sign of his psychological incapacity, while others believe he’s just “telling it like it is.” When we type someone like this, all we’re really doing is showing our own biases. I know many of the Enneagram experts have typed Trump as an unhealthy 8 or 3 or counter-phobic 6, but really all that shows us is how they feel about Trump and those types. I’m sure if there were a Trump-supporting Enneagram-buff they might say that he was a perfect example of a 1, living out exactly what he believes, or a healthy 8, taking charge and “making America great again.” What I’m saying is, what we see has a lot to do with what we believe about this person from our own perspective, and to project those things on to a type could severely limit how that type is seen. The more we play into these limits, the less people are going to be interested in using this tool, because it will become ineffective and demeaning instead of expansive and life-giving.

When I did my Enneagram training with The Narrative Enneagram in California, there was a day where we all got together in a class room and watched several clips of a movie. We then had to guess what type the main character was. Then we were divided into groups based on what type we believed this fictional character to be and we were asked to discuss how we had come to our conclusion. After each group had talked it over, we each sent a representative to the front of the room to present our case and convince everyone else in the room that we were right. The biggest group at the end won the game. It was actually a lot of fun (mostly because they allowed us to heckle the person up front giving their argument) but it also hit home a very important lesson: You can make a case that anyone is almost any type, and at the end of the day it doesn’t matter, because that’s not our work.

So, this isn’t a call out, but a call in. I hope that we as a community can move past the desire to label other people and focus more on the real transformative work that the Enneagram offers us. If we are really concerned about the state of our country and the world, getting down into the real work the Enneagram provides us is the best way to move things in a more conscious and compassionate direction. If we want to see the Enneagram spread and be a catalyst for global transformation, we as a community need to treat it like that’s what it is! I hope we can stop using the Enneagram as an intellectual exercise and put it to work as a truly 3-centered transformational tool. I hope that we can live up to our own standards, and treat the Enneagram like the sacred map that it really is.