#but his story being so humanistic

[circles19]

No matter how many Green hair male characters Mihoyo release. No one will top up like Kosma

[netherfeildren]

Pink : Part I : Humanist Seeking Person in Love

Series Masterlist

Pairing: Joel Miller x F!Reader

Summary: Humanism: an outlook or system of thought attaching prime importance to human rather than divine or supernatural matters. Humanist beliefs stress the potential value and goodness of human beings, emphasize common human needs, and seek solely rational ways of solving human problems.

The story of a son who won’t love you, and his father, who will.

-OR-

the father-in-law AU

Rating: Explicit 18+

Content Warnings: No outbreak AU; Fix-it-fic but the thing that needs fixing is a person; Daddy issues; Daddy kink; Divorce; Welcome to the father-in-law suck and fuck extravaganza; Possessive behavior; Jealousy; Slow burn but like not really; DD/lg dynamics; Older man/Younger woman; Self esteem issues; Discussions of emotional and mental abuse; Unhealthy coping mechanisms

A/N: Check the tags on the masterlist, as well!

Word Count: 7.4K

Read on AO3

Ko-fi

1. Humanist Seeking Person in Love

The video you’d watched had said that the differences between a jamb nut and a coupling nut should have been obvious. A jamb nut, which was what you were currently looking for, was typically half as tall as a standard nut, or a coupling nut, and would be of a small, stouter shape compared to the other options. As you stare at the wall of overwhelming stock, the incomprehensible mess of steel, PVC, aluminum and plastic hardware you feel, a little bit, like you’d like to start screaming as loud as you possibly can, for as long as you possibly can. Just a rip roaring and rageful, top of your lungs, screech. Maybe it’d scare the leering men around you. Maybe they’d desist from the ogling of your ass in the tight confines of your ratty leggings, or the mildly pitying glances as your frustration and confusion becomes more and more obvious.

You try and take a deep breath, glancing down at your phone again and the screenshots you’d taken of the parts you need to fix your leaky kitchen sink. Zooming in, you hold the picture up next to the pipeware currently gripped in your sweaty hand and wonder again if what you’ve chosen is the right piece. You don’t understand why the hardware store, a local business, isn’t as neatly and efficiently organized as the larger chains, and why they make it so damn hard for someone without experience to come in and shop. You don’t want to buy the wrong thing and waste the money you already don’t have, you don’t want to have to make the trek back to this God awful fucking place. You hate the hardware store, you hate the way it smells, dusty and wooden, the cavernous hollow echo of it, the leering gazes of the men shopping, looking at you as if you’re some helpless child, something soft and easy to snap up and eat. You hate the memory of following your father around on many a Sunday morning after he’d forced you to come with him in some false attempt at bonding, at spending time together when really all it was, was another instance of you cowering behind him, trying to make yourself as silent and small as possible so as to avoid his anger and irritation. 

You look back down at the piece of PVC in your clutch, at the picture of what you’re supposed to be buying again, back at the other option, a copper bolt you think might look right but can’t really tell the difference, and you feel the backs of your eyes pinch and go hot and achy. A sharp, throbbing pain starting up behind your left eye and spiraling out like a stain to cover your forehead. You want to go home. You want your kitchen sink to stop leaking. You want the past year to never have happened. For your marriage to not have so irrevocably unraveled that the husband you’d so desperately fought to keep had left you out in the cold, divorced, very nearly penniless in a new apartment that you couldn’t make feel like home no matter how many fall scented candles and throw pillows you stuffed into every nook and cranny. You want to not have to make decisions like these and take care of things like this. You want very, very badly for someone else to come and take care of you, help you, make the choices that seem very hard in the moment but that, in the grand scheme of things, aren’t really so difficult, but that still sometimes call for a second opinion, wiser, more experienced hands. 

And in that next blink, in a soft, deep voice that should not be as easily recognizable in your mind as it is given the handful of times you’ve actually heard it, your name, being murmured from behind you. The lilt of a question, the gruff of shock coating the syllables as it pushes against your bare nape. Soft as a sledgehammer, like ice water down your naked back, your shoulders hitch up to your ears, going tense and frightened, a hot flush of shame spilling through you, the keenest desire to run away from that soft voice as fast as your stupidly October flip flopped feet’ll take you. You hiccup the half sound of his name, not turning around, lashes fluttering quickly to prevent the dry heat of your eyes from spilling over, nerveless fingers going listless around the plastic nut. You don’t want to turn around. This is a cursed place, this hardware store, and you should never have come, and you really do hate it here. Deep breath, deep breath. Be polite, be succinct. You don’t need to talk to him. You don’t need to think about the past. Fuck the sink, fuck the pipes. You’ll just move apartments. You let a long stream of air out of your mouth, and then turn on the ball of your foot to face him. 

“Mr. Miller,” you breathe with a limp smile you know isn’t going to fool anyone. 

He frowns, the line of his mouth wavering as he tries to contain his displeasure. “We really back to that?” You shake your head, looking away from him as the last shopper in the aisle you’re inhabiting walks away, leaving the two of you alone. The store suddenly seems to exist in a vacuum echo, all other patrons seeming to disappear, all sound going out. You even feel the imitation of a hollow pop in your ear drums. When you look back at him, he’s really scowling now. His strong brow pulled down over those too pretty, thickly lashed hazel eyes that you know so well on another man, a younger version of him. 

It was the first thing you’d noticed about him, the first time Sam had introduced you to his father, they have the same eyes. The same but different. There was a coldness to Sam’s gaze that you hadn’t recognized until it was too late for you, but you recognized it now, with a painful sort of awareness, recognized the lack thereof in his father’s eyes, how different they were even in their similarity. 

He raises his brows at you, a pressing gesture, “Joel.” His name feels like salt on an open sore in your mouth. “What are you doing here?” And he looks at you, just a little bit, like you’re an idiot, or maybe that’s only you, for his voice is gentle when he says, “Pickin’ up supplies with some of the boys on my crew. What’re you doin’ here, sweetheart? Sam with you?” Your heart beats like that of a small and hunted creature, pounding painfully against the confines of your ribs while a hot, humiliated flush washes through your entire body, heat suffusing your face so intensely there’s probably steam rising off the surface of your skin. You shake your head quickly, a barely there jerk. You’re suddenly trembling so hard your throat aches as if it’s been pierced by a lancet straight through. Another sharp jerk, and he steps forward a concerned look marring his face. 

“You haven’t spoken to him.” It isn’t a question. 

“He’s been feildin’ my calls for months. Assumed I’d done something– something else, last time to piss him off again. What’s wrong? Everything okay?” He pauses, head tilting, and you can’t look him in the face as you say it, gaze falling to your fingers twisted around the nut. 

“We’re not together anymore. He– he left me. We got divorced six months ago.”

Shocked into silence he takes another step towards you, the toe of his heavy boot coming into your eye line. The ends are thick and rounded, and you wonder if there’s a casing of steel within, how much a kick in the ribs would hurt delivered by a boot like that, and the violent thought startles you, your eyes going wide, shooting up to his face as if worried he could read your thoughts. Ashamed that something like that in reference to him would even cross your mind, for looking at him, the gentleness in his gaze, the utter concern, a man like this would never hurt a creature softer than him, you know that. 

It’s funny, or strange, or a phenomena not easily understandable or explainable unless you’d had a certain type of experience with a certain type of man, but there was a sort of sixth sense instilled in a person who’d dealt with cruel men that made it easy to recognize when one had the capacity to hurt you and when he didn’t. There were, of course, those who were good at masking it, but there was always something, a way they held themselves or moved around others, the cadence of their voices, clues that spoke of the sort of man he was. And from the first moment you’d met him, you’d thought Joel had something that spoke only of gentleness. Despite his size and seemingly rough aspect, there was something about his voice, and the way he carried himself, the way he moved around those who were smaller or weaker or less, less alive, less potent than him, that was always careful and always aware. 

“What?” He moves as if he’s going to reach for you, and you flinch back, the curve of your spine bumping into the framing of the shelves behind you, face turning away quickly. He goes tense, forcing himself into stillness, the white of his teeth flashing in a grimace, but he puts his palms up in a staying gesture, it’s alright, easy, he murmurs, I won’t touch you, hands lowering to fist in the pockets of his jeans into tight balls of false restraint. As if he’s afraid of what they might do of their own volition otherwise. “What do you mean he left you? What happened? He–”

“I don’t want to discuss this with you. Call him again or– or I don’t know. It’s not my business anymore. He was never happy with me,” you stupidly add, finally braving a look back at his eyes again, a bitter laugh scratching up your throat, “You know this. Call your son, Joel.”

You move to leave, to get away from him, but he shifts, blocking your escape, sending your heart up into your throat. “Honey, wait–” but you’re spinning on your heel the other way, stumbling in your flip flops, and you think he says something about the wrong way, but you’re rushing, blindly trying to get away from him down the aisle as fast as you can. You’re going to cry, you can feel it, any second now. You weren’t expecting to see him, the reminder of everything that had happened, your marriage and its failure and the part Joel had played in it. A painful and jarring shock to your nervous system that you’d not been prepared to receive. You blindly scramble through the aisles of the hardware store, losing yourself to the gloom of the dimly lit back rows where plywood and carpeting are stocked, that detested dusty hollow smell intensifying. You take another blind turn, another, until the sounds of the store have gone faint and then a frightening pressurized silence. Bracing your palms against one of the eye level shelves you let your head fall between your shoulders, your bag sliding down your arm to hang and sway at the bend of your elbow. You watch the slow back and forth pendulous movement, eyes wide and blurred. If you don’t blink, you won’t cry, and you’re so fucking tired of crying over this. 

“If you were tryn’a get away from me, exit was in the opposite direction,” comes his voice again. Your eyes flutter shut, a single tear drips from the line of your lashes onto the dusty concrete floor. 

“Please, go away,” you croak.

“Tell me what happened.”

“What do you think happened? Don’t ask stupid questions.”

“He– he’s a fuckin’ idiot, sweetheart–”

Your stomach lurches, “Don’t call me that.”

But he doesn’t listen, continues on unheeded. “There’s gotta be something we can do. I’ll– I’ll talk to him. I’ll make him see that–” You let your head fall back the opposite way now, looking up at the high, cavernous ceiling of the store, another bitter laugh. It’s the only kind left to you now. 

“I don’t want him back, Joel. Be serious.”

“He needs you–” And oh, that makes you angry. 

“Fuck you.” You spin around to spit the words at him, rushing forward to shove at his rock solid chest. He doesn’t budge even half an inch. You shove again, again, a humiliating sob making its way up your chest. You blink then, you can’t help it, the tears fall unrestrained. It’s a specific type of humiliating, facing the estranged father of the man who you’d been married to, who’d been unable to love you, who’d abandoned you. 

Sam and Joel had been unaware of each other’s existence for almost twenty eight years, but two years ago, Sam’s mother had finally told him about his father, his name, where he lived, how they’d gotten together when they were too young, and how she’d split, scared and vulnerable, without telling him a thing. The two of you’d gone looking for the man, and you’d both been varying degrees of shocked at what you’d found. Sam, faced with a man so unlike himself he’d immediately resented him more than he already had for the fact of his absence his entire life. You, as well, faced with a man so unlike your husband that it had made you resent your marriage even more. Immediately welcoming, loving, patient, gracious and generous and forgiving of the fact that a son had been kept from him for almost three decades. Despite the severity of his character, his serious reservedness, he’d done everything in his power to open himself to this long lost son. Not once had the news been met with cruel anger or outrage. Joel had accepted his son immediately and without question, listening to his mother’s reasoning, accepting the fact that a mistake had been made, forgiving, willing to move on and embrace Sam in all the ways he’d been denied for so long. Sam hadn’t been able to fathom it. He’d been mistrustful, hostile, angry, all the things he always was but compounded and heightened to a terrible degree he eventually started taking out on you. 

And it was funny because the fraught, or lack thereof, relationships with your fathers had been the thing that had initially bonded the two of you. Too young and alone and without direction, you’d met him in your last year of college. The relationship had immediately developed without boundaries or reason, you’d been obsessed, a little desperate, unquestioning, and then married a few short months later. Two too young, too lost people, burdened with daddy issues. A terribly sad cliche. You’d never had a chance. You never should have been. And there’s a part of you now, looking up at this man, your ex-husband’s father, that wants to feel angry at him, that wants to spit in his face and say this is all your fault, everything that happened to me, everything that was done to me was in your name, and I blame you for all of it, but you know it’s without reason or countenance. And worst of all, anger, blame, resentment, it’s not anything near to the things you feel when you look at him. The memory of a small, dark restroom flashes in your mind’s eye, his eyes gleaming above your face, the thick slope of his shoulder, the patterned wallpaper behind him, sickening comfort. 

You go still and frozen, fingers twisting in the front of his shirt, jerking with a painful shiver from the top of your head, down the length of your vertebrae, to the tips of your toes that cramp and spasm. Looking up at his face, you can feel a pulse throbbing in the muscle beneath your right eye, and the way he looks down at you, as if he’s never felt as sorry for any other creature in his entire life as he does for you in this moment, so embarrassing. You let your head fall forward again, landing with a soft thump against his chest, an uncontrollable tremble moving like fire through your frame. “Fuck you,” you say again, whispered, soft and weak and without any sort of force behind it. “How dare you say that to me,” another tear. “He’s always needed you. It was never me he wanted, never me he needed. It was always you.” You watch as one hand withdraws from its pocket cage, lifting to push a soft tendril of hair back behind your ear. And there’s fire left in the wake of the brush of his skin at the hollow there. Another shiver of a worse kind, one of desire, one of lust, moves through you. 

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it – I’m sorry, honey.” Stupid southern charm and their stupid pet names. You clutch at his shirtfront more tightly, press your forehead harder into his sternum, and he brings his hand to your shoulder, tucking you into himself more securely. He’s huge and warm and smells faintly of salt and sweat and laundry detergent. Something clean and fresh and masculine. He smells alive. His other hand comes up to the back of your head, moving through your hair. Fucking, Sam, he murmurs above you, and you’re sure he’s shaking his head in that disappointed fatherly way. “Tell me what you were looking for. What had you lookin’ so confused and irritated in the plumbing aisle?” You’d laugh if you could, a non bitter sort, but you don’t have the ability anymore, and that makes you so angry. Angry and irrational.

“My sink’s leaking, and I can’t afford a plumber because your son divorced me and left me with no money and no house and nothing for myself, and I hate this stupid place. I hate the way it smells, and I hate that nothing’s labeled clearly, and I hate the way you men,” you shove at his chest a little bit again, “look at me like I’m some dumb little girl who doesn’t know left from right.” Even if that’s what you kind of feel like, a dumb little girl who doesn’t know left from right anymore. Slightly out of breath, you go limp and exhausted against him. His palm flattens at the center of your spine, supporting you, and it’s so fucking inappropriate. You should move away. You don’t know him well enough for this, he’s your ex-father-in-law, you shouldn't let him touch you, but should and should not and right and wrong and inappropriate or not has never really mattered to you where Joel Miller is concerned. “This is the worst place in the whole world,” you mumble, voice muffled from where your face is squished against the annoyingly hard and delicious muscles of his chest. You feel, keenly, like you’re being a little bit ridiculous, a little bit embarrassing, but his big hand is slowly moving up and down the length of your spine, soothing and comforting, and you can’t bring yourself to care. He’d been kind from the first second you’d met him, and then, at the worst moment, he’d been understanding, and you’d never really stood a chance against him either. 

You’d never had a chance with the son, you’d never stood a chance against the father, there had never really been much choice or possibility for you as a whole where either of them were concerned.

I was such a little person. Tiny in my insignificance, naivety, hope. Desperate to be as good as I could be, and pathetic in my failure to make myself into what I thought the world wanted of me. 

“You can’t afford–” He breathes out roughly through his nose, stopping himself from continuing. “Do y’know what it is you’re looking for? What part?” And you nod your head, still buried against him, unable or unwilling to pull away. “Let me help you,” and he says it so, so gently that it makes you want to stomp your foot and cry and throw a fit at the unfairness of it all. 

“Don’t want your help,” you can’t help the muffled whine it comes out as. All you want is for someone to help you. 

“Of course you don’t, sweetheart,” he soothes. “But let me anyway. S’the least I can do for talkin’ out of my ass.” You finally pull back, looking up at him, and he brings his thumb up to catch the wetness at the fine skin beneath your eye. “Please, don’t cry,” he whispers like it hurts him. 

And even though he’s currently catching the salt of your eyes with his fingers, you lie obstinately, “I’m not,” whispered back just as quiet. 

After he helps you find the correct piece for your sink, finally, which ends up being neither of the options you’d been previously weighing, a fact that almost sends you over the deep end again, and paying for it at his aggravating and overbearing insistence, he walks you to your car. 

“Is he still in Austin?” He asks as he holds your door open for you, your shopping bag still clutched in his hand. One of the guys on his crew had come to find him while you were checking out, but he’d sent him away with a shake of his head, said he had something to take care of. 

“I don’t know, but he sold our house.”

“Fuck– Where’re you living?” The sound of his spit curse has a wet flutter moving through you, shame following bitterly in its wake. 

“I got an apartment in the East Side.”

“And he just left you to fend for yourself? Took your fucking house?” He’s getting angry, and you don’t think you’ve ever seen him get angry. Something foreign like excitement jumps within you. 

“Well, that’s the point of divorce, Joel. You separate and are left to your own devices.” You reach for the little plastic bag, but he jerks it out of your reach. 

“He has a responsibility to you. He–”

“Again… the point of divorce.”

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ, that boy,” he mutters, shaking his head. And that’s the thing of it, you think, that’s always been the crux of the issue. Sam was always a boy, has always been just a boy… there had never been any chance. “Let me come help you with the sink. Let me fix it for you.” Something to take care of, that’s what he’d said, that’s what he’d called you, what he sees you as. 

You’re shaking your head before he can even finish getting the words out, full of regret, and a wish that it could have all been different from the very start. “You know that isn’t a good idea,” and he goes silent because he does, he does know, he’d known since the first time probably. It had been obvious in the way that a secret thing can only be between the two people involved in the unsaid. “I can do it myself. Don’t worry. I’ll find a way.”

“You still got the same number?” He asks.

“Please, don’t call me. Call Sam. He’s the one that needs you. He’s the one that–”

“And who’s taking care of you? Who’s gonna take care of you, sweetheart? You need someone too, we all do.”

A flash of that earlier anger again, and you reach forward to rip the bag out of his clutch now, angry because he’s right. Because he’d always seemed to have a grossly misplaced ability to read you exactly as you are. He’d read you for what you were from the first second he’d laid eyes on you, naive and hopeful and falsely in love with a son who’d never loved either of you in return. “Maybe,” you tell him, “But that can’t be you.” He looks away from you, gruff sound of irritation passing through his clenched teeth, and he drags a heavy palm down his bearded mouth. Fuck, again that provoking spit curse. The wallpaper in that dark restroom had been covered in little blue motifs, butter yellow details sparsed throughout. It had surprised you, the pretty and delicate design in the home of a, for all intents and purposes, bachelor. It spoke of intention and attention to detail, to his space, to care of his home. That dim moment was, strangely, sickly, the brightest memory of the entire two years of your marriage. 

“You still got my number?” He presses anyways. Unheeded or uncaring of you trying to push him away, and there’s something about that, that’s pleasurable, his inability to let a thing go where you’re concerned, his unwillingness to allow you to hold him at arms length. Like he doesnt care to be kept away from you, and so he won’t. You nod your head once, face burning, molars grinding to keep yourself still and in place. You’d felt, for two years, trapped, running in place, and now left limp and exhausted and colorless, and you hope that he can’t read that exhaustion in you. For some reason, that would be more embarrassing than everything else, for him to see just how defeated you’d been left. He gives you one of those looks, those direct, piercing, aggravating looks that you’ve seen from him before, aggravating in a way that is inciting, like a relentless tongue against a slick swollen cunt, God. Your hands are shaking, and he bends his head down to your level to look at your directly, “You promise me that if you need anything, anything at all, doesn’t matter what it is – that you’ll call me. No matter the hour, no matter what it is. Promise me.” Another sharp jerk of your chin, if you talk you’ll scream or make a sound not wholly belonging to the body of a girl, woman, whatever you are. Another nod, the mute shape of an okay passing through your lips. And his face is so concerned, his hand almost lifted in the imitation of what you have to tell yourself, as a form of self preservation, is an ill intentioned caress or hug, but that you know he’d mean as nothing more than genuine comfort. You deflate in relief when he doesn’t touch you, right here, out in the open for the whole world to bear witness to. Things like that, after all, are only meant for dark, wallpapered bathrooms. He’d already taught you this. 

-

The relationship had not been what either of them had expected, Sam and Joel, from the get go. There was a smallness to his son, a pettiness and a cruelty and a spoiled rotten vein through the core of him that was incongruous with who Joel was as a man, something that was glaringly obvious to all involved. And try as he might, in those early days, they could not overcome the disparity in their personalities. The attempts from Joel at closeness had been fraught with tension and unsaid resentments, and eventually Sam had given up, stopped answering his father’s calls, evading his attempts to connect. Your marriage had spiraled into dissolution shortly after that. As if the failure to find whatever it was he’d for so long hoped for in a relationship with his father had highlighted all of the things you yourself lacked, all the ways in which you were so specifically dissatisfying to him and always would be. 

The marriage had not ended up being what either of you had hoped for, the honeymoon phase quashed and dead early on, no brightly lit halcyon. Reality had set in quickly when confronted with the disjointedness of your pairing, a bone out of place, your specific inability to please him in the ways he’d thought you would when he’d first met you. There was something about you that had always been a little bit lacking, something ascetic and cold natured about your personality at times. Since you were a child, trying to appease an unappeasable father, to emulate a singular mother. Always impossible, always falling just short of utter failure. Not so terrible that you were outwardly obvious in your mediocrity, but never everything you could be. Painfully, succinctly average. Sam had come to realize this quickly. Perhaps, unaware prior to tying himself to you because the only thing you’d ever been not average at, was being a little bit of a liar, of being placatingly complacent when the moment necessitated, manipulative in a way that you found protecting. But you see, that’s what happened when you had a cruel father who always needed appeasing, something Sam, in his abject fatherlessness, couldn't understand. Funny, you’d said that to him once, near the end, called him abjectly fatherless, his weakness a consequence of his lack of a paternal role model, and oh, how he’d hated that. Endings could bring out such cruelty in people, you’d found. 

But the manipulation of a moment had become, in some ways, your only talent. The art of superficial gratification at a moment's notice as a way to keep the people around you falsely happy and calm. Like all small and frightened creatures, you’d learned your strengths well, but as all truths do, yours had eventually surfaced. The fact that you weren’t really so appeasing in the ways he desired, not so nice, not so perfect, not so subservient. That the persona was all just a way to keep him happy as a means of getting someone to love you, to stay because you didn’t know how else to be. 

Your mother always said you could’ve been nicer to him. She was a kind, soft, patient thing. Quiet and easy and always, always, above everything else, understanding. It was the worst thing about her. A detriment, a weakness, and she resented you for your resentment, for seeing her as such, but you could never help it. Always asking you why you couldn’t just be a nice girl, a good girl. 

You didn’t think you had not been nice, not been good. You had only been yourself.

Your father had always hated that about you, you being yourself. The man you’d chosen to marry didn’t seem to like it very much either. And she’d tried to instill her better qualities in you, your mother, so you weren’t all bad all the time. There could be a brightness and a lightness and a sweetness to you sometimes, it’s true. You weren’t always all bad. But there was – is still – also a bitterness and a resentment and an anger, a screaming that you could not quell no matter how hard you tried. And so you’d attepted to give him everything you could, your husband, everything you had at your disposal in all ways, to do and be all he could have ever asked of you during those two small years of marriage. Because truly, they had felt so very small, made you even smaller. 

Everything except for sex. You’d never been able to give him that the way he’d wanted. 

At first, it had been normal, sweet, soft missionary in the darkness, tepid insinuations of orgasms, always hushed, always exactly how he wanted it. But eventually, when the other parts of you began to fail, he got mean and callous and casually cruel. And as you pulled away physically, he called you frigid, a prude, boring, cold, bad in bed, didn't know how to make a man hard. And it had made you so agonizingly insecure, already a sensitive and anxious thing when it came to your physical form, he’d beaten you down, embarrassed you, belittled you.

With time, you’d realized the truth of it which had been nothing more than that you’d never really wanted him. He had never made you desperate, he had never made you wet. It was his character, his attitude, yes, but it was also him. He just wasn’t it for you, and it wasnt that you were a prude or frigid at all, only that you needed patience and understanding and care, gentleness. Things he possessed none of. 

You just needed a little time to warm up and someone who wanted to give you that time. 

The reality that your life had not been full of varied and foolish adventures, and that time had seemed to simply slip away like an echo in the brain from one moment to the next was duly painful. A handful of months of wan and false lust, two years of cold, bitter marriage, and now, six months of barren aloneness. Too many mistakes had been made, too many regrets, three big ones that could be held like stones scorched to burn by the sun in the palm of your hand so that even if you let them go eventually, their imprint would still be scarred into your flesh afterwards forever.

So, perhaps the divorce had been painful in the moment. Or not perhaps, there was nothing uncertain about it, you’d fought tooth and nail to make it work, to keep him with you. Prostrated and humiliated and debased yourself. But with time, it became obvious that it was a fantasy you decided you should finally cast aside, as all children do childish things at a certain age. And then, it had been the easiest thing in the world. After all, and let’s be honest now for a moment, the reckoning had come in the shape of his father. That is, at the end of it, the reason you’re really here. 

Sat now, before the open cabinet below your kitchen sink, leaky pipe drip, drip, dripping monotonously in front of your glazed over eyes, you think of him. He’s a large man, intimidating and dark and stoic. Taller and broader than his son. Lush, mahogany curls streaked with silver that speak of age and experience like the smile lines around his eyes. Deeply grooved when he laughs that beautiful laugh of his. He looks exactly like the opposite of whatever his son is, like he’d have the ability to make the opposite of you, to pull out of you whatever the antithesis is of what his son was able to. It had been immediate, the nature of your thoughts towards him. The desire, the desire, the desire, you had wanted like you’d never wanted before — like an illness, like dying. 

Your marriage had been circling the drain, and then you’d met him, and it should have been innocuous. He’d been kind and polite and welcoming, but also, aloof. Holding himself at a distance, something afraid that he carried within himself, like he didn't want to hope, like he was just a little bit scared of what it meant now to have a son, something to lose. You knew a little bit about that, the worst part of it all is never the cruelty, it’s the hopelessness. Everything had become so much worse after meeting him. An unbearable sort of awareness of something that your listless, frigid self recognized as man, man, man, something like hunger. Something slanted about the desire, wrong, sure, for he was your husband's father, and yet, you wanted him. You wanted to know what he smelled and tasted like, and what the weight of his cock on your tongue would feel like. If it was bigger than his sons, you were almost positive of that, if it would stretch the corners of your mouth to near splitting, the hinges of your jaw to aching. 

You’d met your husband's father, and had realized, painfully, with uncompromising clarity, all that your husband could be, all that he was not, all that he would never be. There was no comparison between the boy and the man, and it made you hurt. 

Your eyes flit back to the screen of your open laptop and the instructional video there, popping another fuzzy peach gummy onto the flat of your tongue, mouth full of sucking sugar. You’re going to fix this sink if it’s the last thing you do, and you’re not going to think about him again. But tomorrow, you’ll start not thinking about him tomorrow. The talent of a liar never really wanes.

The apartment is quiet, nothing but the cheerful crackling of your sweet pumpkin candle and the mocking splish splash of the drain pipe. You had, in recent weeks, come to think of your abandonment as something of an accomplishment. Perhaps, your loneliness is a good thing, you’ll tell yourself as a comfort, a sort of friend; you can’t be used against yourself again in this solitude, and oh, how you’d been used. That anemia in your character, the ascetic thread of your personality had been weaponized and wielded against you until you couldn’t tell up from down and left from right. You were certain there’d been cheating, even if you’d never had any proof to confirm it, merely grateful you’d never gotten sick as way of evidence. But you knew. And it could've been so much worse for you, of course, of course it could have. But he’d left your mind so off kilter, broken and confused and not yourself. Utterly damaged in a way that was humiliating and devastating when you thought of the way you’d been, such a little person. So often, not a woman, just a little girl. 

And then his father. Joel. Seeing him today – you had never felt the way you should have felt towards him. Like your eyes were open, awake for the first time in your entire life. A man like that – he was changing. And you wanted, needed very much to be changed. Seeing him today, being presented with that reminder of what he was, how he made you feel, how he’d always made you feel. There’s something ghoulish about you concerning him – about this desire. That ascetic or anemic or under-grown, illformed thing about you, exterminated in the thrum of how alive he is. How unlike his son. You’d never known what it specifically was, never been able to categorize it, and then there had been that moment, brought so low, six feet beneath the ground sort of debased, and he’d been there and you had been – unburdened from the weight of his own son, by him, and you’re not even sure he knew the extent of it. The power he’d wielded over you in that moment in the dark. And you can’t say it out loud, what it is you’d want from him, you can’t even say out loud what it is about him that changes you as it does – not a woman, just a little girl – but you think that if you could just see him, then you’d know, or maybe you could be brave. You don’t know what it is, but you’d know it then, with him in front of you, you’d have the answer to this question that’s plagued you for so long – how to be yourself in a way that is good.

You’re pushing yourself to your feet, fueled by the thought, fingers gripped over the ledge of the counter to pull yourself up, sink forgotten, stumbling to your front door, shoving your feet into your shoes and fumbling for your keys. How to be yourself in a way that is good. 

When you were seventeen, your father had been at his angriest. Angry in that way that all angry father’s are. Loud and brutish – an anger that is cowing, a sign of true weakness. Brute force in the shape of the man who gave you life. When you think of it now, even as a grown woman, you still feel that phantom limb of fear, and you know that it isn’t normal for a grown woman to be afraid of her father, and yet you are. And then to think that you’d gone from your parents home directly to the bed of the same sort of man, one even crueler, if possible. You’re forced to laugh your singular terrible, self deprecating laugh at the irony of it – even worse, if possible. For what’s worse than a person who constantly needs to be soothed into kindness and patience and calm? 

Once, in that terrible seventeenth year, funny and strange and unknowingly perfect, you’d been gifted the Farmer’s Almanac by your elderly neighbor. She’d said that she’d read it since she was a girl, liked the peace in knowing that the year had been predicted by experts and put down on paper. It made life seem more secure, more in control in a small way. You’d needed that during that turbulent time, locked in your teenage bedroom, lulled to sleep by the sound of your father’s anger and the year’s long-range weather predictions before your blurry eyes. It was so comforting to be able to read the future in text, catastrophe or sunshine, at least it was there. You still read it to this day. And there’s no congruity to the thought now, as you crawl into your car, a ghoul in the night, banging your knee on the hastily opened car door, sprouting gooseflesh in the cold; this desire, desire, desire that is the worst thing you’ve ever felt in your whole life, and yet, you can’t bring yourself to stop because there is something about control in this moment also. Control like knowing what the future will be like on paper, control like a man who is entirely grown into himself, who knows who he is and who he is not and is not uncertain, who will not yell, who will not hurt you. He has this – your husband’s father – you know he does. There is something about control, there is something about knowing how a thing will be, there is something about being yourself in a way that is good. 

-

You’d picked up the wrong wine on your way here. Rushing, trying to fix your makeup in the car, you’d gotten confused, chosen the one he didn’t want instead of the one he did. And it was nothing, or an accident, surely nothing to incite his ire, but he’s so fucking angry hovering in front of you. He looks at you, now sometimes, like he hates you, like you’re the worst thing that’s ever happened to him. He said you’d humiliated him in front of his father. That he was going to think he didn’t have good taste, couldn’t afford a decent bottle of wine. And you don’t know Joel very well, but he doesn’t seem like the type of man to care about such things. Calling you an idiot in that poisoned shrill tone he takes on when he’s delivering a set down, and you’re trying to tell him to please, please keep your voice down, Sam, your father is going to hear you. You���d heard someone say once that a truly powerful man never feels the need to raise his voice, it simply isn’t necessary for him, and you’re reminded, terribly, of your father, with the sight of your shrill and seething husband in front of you.  And then a low toned that’s enough, son from the mouth of the kitchen, and it’s so much worse, entirely catastrophic in a way, and you’re rushing away so humiliated, face on fire, tear caught over the trough of your lower lid, trying the doors in the hallway for the nearest restroom. You hear the murmur of voices, one struggling to maintain composure, the other, cool and steady, then the slam of the front door, and finally, the silent din of his house settling around the two of you as you find a restroom to hide in. Your heart beats so fast it makes you nauseous, knees strangely aching, listening to the heavy steps of Joel’s boots, as if he’s trying to warn you with those measured, weighted thuds that he’s coming, coming, coming for you. Turning to face the far corner of the restroom, you press your palm over your mouth, face slippery and burning and so stupid, the soft swoosh of the opening door, a paused breath as he takes in your form huddled into the wallpaper, and then the muted snick of the door closing behind him, shutting the two of you away together.

Part II

Netherfeildren's Masterlist

Updates Blog!

[hobisfavoritespritecan]

Hey,

First of all, I absolutely adore your writing style and in general your stories (especially the Hannibal ones). Could you please write one, where Hannibal is overly possessive, because he thought his wife got too close to Chilton at one of his dinner parties? And to end it all of there is smut. (If you are comfortable with that).Thank you for considering

Close Call

Hannibal Lecter X Reader

⚠️ Warnings: Over possessiveness on Hannibal's part, slight angst, swearing, mentions of blood and wounds, sociopathic and manipulative tendencies, uhh first time writing smut so hopefully it's okay (it's fairly light) ⚠️

I also didn't read through this again and edit it, so I apologize for any grammatical or spelling errors!

Hannibal finds himself somewhat outraged at an overly confident Chilton getting too close to his wife. No matter, he'll just have to remind the two of you of what's his.

Dinner parties were nothing short of extravagant when it came to Hannibal Lecter's craft.

The wines were paired with the delicacies adorning the plates on the mahogany table; everything had its own respective place, down to the last spoon and fork on each intricately folded napkin. There was, of course, the smell wafting through the corridors of the Lecters' home, signifying the delicious meal being prepared in the kitchen and acting as bait to those mingling in the living room as they awaited the call to be seated. From your perspective, the table had to be crafted to perfection so that the party full of rich good-for-nothings had no complaints of the events of the night. Of course, you adored your husband's cooking, but less so you enjoyed the company he chose. Intelligence wasn't something that came from the accumulation of degrees and the bragging of doing so- in your opinion- but rather came from the passion associated with the understanding of others and their natural environments. In other words, conversations of nonsensical retellings of the rise to power and gathering of wealth that these particular guests had were of no interest to you. These people spoke of books on law and work projects as though they've forgotten entirely what it means to express humanity: experience.

But you were ever so careful to express your opinion on the subject of what it means to be human. Although you acknowledged your differing perspective, you didn't want to diminish the perspectives of those who might only know of the desires associated with "book smarts," and not what you referred to as "experience points." These two things could coexist, but it was often that a person leaned heavier towards either side. You still had more to learn about the balance of these, but alas, that is the human condition.

Hannibal loved you for this.

Being someone so intensely driven towards the path of psychology and law, it was refreshing being married to someone who expressed opposition to having that be the basis of every conversation. He loved a good conversation on written words and philosophers and mathematical expressions, but he loved even more to have someone in his life that kept him his understanding of biology and the preservation of his humanity. With his- er- hobby, as some would refer to it as- it became difficult to maintain this humanistic approach. These dinner parties served more as an obligatory social preservation to his image, so as not to be caught with his peculiar hobby.

And the culinary arts were his escape, anyways. A win-win except for the fact you'd be bored out of your mind talking to some of these people, he knew. Nevertheless, you had a polite smile etched onto your face wearing very presentable attire. You were a master at code-switching, it seemed, replacing your usually laid-back and outgoing personality with a more hoity-toity, reserved aura.

You had on a slightly more revealing outfit; a dress so navy it almost seemed black under any lighting that wasn't direct candlelight. This dress had been cut just above the knees with an off-shoulder neckline, exposing the very top of your chest and the beginning of your upper thighs. It was classily paired with silver earrings gifted to you by your husband, and a half up-do with your precariously crafted curls threatening to spill out of the fastened hairclip from behind. Hannibal had expressed just how lovely you'd looked as he helped you with your zipper earlier, placing a hemline of kisses to your collarbone.

He wasn't the only one who'd had this realization dawn on them during the night, however. A bright-eyed Dr. Chilton who'd received nothing short of a pity-invite, found himself drawing away from the conveniently placed appetizers to the lavish chairs facing the fireplace where you sat. He silently waited for your conversation to conclude before he decided to sweep in and take the woman's place on your right, finishing the glass of brandy in his hand before doing so.

"(Y/N)," He almost seemed exasperated, as if he were already slightly drunk, "A pleasure."

He reached out his hand to you in an attempt to get you to shake it as an overly friendly gesture, acknowledgement to his presence. You proceeded to smile at him instead, as you'd become familiar to his intentions.

"Hello, Dr. Chilton, how are you?"

His face flushed as he withdrew his hand from your space, opting to rest it against his leg as he sunk further into his chair, getting more comfortable. He was definitely drunk and if not drunk, then the far side of tipsy. You already didn't care for the guy much, so this chance encounter was a hinderance in your eyes before conversational topics even arose.

"You know, I never understood the drab curtains you chose for the interior of your living room, Mrs. Lecter. They block out all of the sunlight." He began, eyeing the bottle of scotch being poured out by another guest to the left of your chair. His eyes seemed to be glazed over as he spoke, however, the dimly lit fireplace seemed to cast some light back into them. His suit of choice was a corduroy one. The heavy material of the fabric already making him break out in a slight sweat.

Grimacing, you feign another smile as you fully acclimate yourself to the conversation at hand. You tell yourself to remember your polite flattery, but honestly with the way Dr. Chilton was, you knew he would take any sort of attention to his character the wrong way.

"Yes, that was the way we intended them to be, doctor. Have you ever been to our home during the daytime? It's not as drab as you may have perceived it to be."

Dr. Chilton had been coming onto you for quite some time now. Despite knowing you were wed and the many implications of your marriage you'd spoken about, he still managed to hold onto the hope that maybe one day something would spark between the two of you. It wouldn't. It hadn't. His blatantly disrespectful comments about yours and Hannibal's relationship were starting to burrow under your skin and take root in an uncomfortable fashion. Part of you felt bad for the man, another part wanted to sock him in the face.

Respectably, of course.

"Perhaps not. Maybe I spoke out of turn." He claimed, uneasily moving about in his chair despite his initial comfortability at the beginning of your dialogue. Maybe if you kept with the slight I-don't-like-you innuendos, then maybe he would be drunk enough to give it a rest and would return to his normal self come morrow.

"Maybe." You agree, taking a sip from your glass of Chardonnay. It was almost dinnertime. You could hold out until then, couldn't you?

"You know," Chilton began, staring deep into the fire and allowing a hushed sigh to escape your lips in anticipation of another redundant comment, "I used to set fires in Uni all the time. Its a miracle I graduated with any degree at all with the amount of trouble I used to get into as a boy."

Pause. Was there finally something worthwhile to discuss with this man?

"Really? And the occasion was...?" You asked, trying to direct the topic back to this small bombshell the Doctor had just dropped in your presence. Experience points were far more interesting to talk about than a poor understanding of the "48 Laws of Power," which was the last conversation you'd had.

He seemed to perk up in his chair realizing that you'd finally taken something that left his mouth with interest. "None, we were just playing with matches and grew bored. Only got caught because the wind carried the flames back to our dorm which almost set alight." He smiled and for a moment, you could see the memory replaying through those glossy eyes of his. You felt included, as if you'd been there yourself, watching the growing light of the flames dance around the edges of the matches you were playing with.

As if on cue, your husband's hand was gently but firmly placed on your shoulder from behind. You knew instantly it was him because of the wafting smell of his woodsy cologne and the wine he was drinking infiltrating your nose. His grip on you was polite but there was an edge to it, an unfamiliar one at that. Was something wrong?

Turning around, you see his darkened glare towards Chilton in the chair next to you. His matching dark navy suit making him look all the more professional and intimidating in this light; if you were Chilton you'd have run far far away from the glare Hannibal had. He seemed to pay no mind, however, eyes still focused on you until your husband broke the silence:

"Dinnertime."

It was at that moment that you noticed all the other guests had made their way to the kitchen and the three of you were the only ones in the living room. How long had you been talking to the doctor for? Hannibal's repressed anger suddenly made sense.

Walking to the kitchen, you were in awe at the sight before you. Hannibal had really put his all into tonight, and it showed. The plates were nothing short of art with the first course on display with accompanying sauces and garnish that turned them into something out of a museum painting. The entire get-up was something out of the Renaissance itself; everything in its perfect place. Hannibal stood at the head of the table, glass in hand as he prepared to make a toast to progress the night's dinner.

"I would like to thank you all for coming out tonight."

A collection of smiles and exchanged glances ensued, everyone pleased with their invite.

"Amongst this crowd are the most intellectual and inspiring people I've had the pleasure of getting to become familiar with. You're all of high accomplishments and achievements and I would like to thank each of you, individually, with a meal that encapsulates such dedication shown by you all."

Your husband then smiled at you and raised his glass.

"I would also like to thank my lovely wife, with whom I share this simple but joyous life with."

There was a hint of something there, something alongside the adoration he expressed for you on the daily. There was a twinge of that anger once more, but could it really be directed towards your conversation with Chilton? It seemed so clear to you that your husband surpassed the former in every way possible: intelligence and compassion, hell, down to the formal attire he adorned himself with daily. There was no way he would feel threatened by another man so unruly.

"Likewise." You said, tilting your glass up to the ceiling in acknowledgement of his kind and respectable words.

"Once more to reiterate, MY wife and I spent a long time on this meal so I hope you all enjoy it." He smiled a forced grin and directed his gaze towards Chilton. "And nothing on the menu for tonight is vegetarian."

...

The night was filled with more of the usual countless bantering between everyone in the room, trying to appeal more and more to everyone else. You were swept into what seemed like every conversation in the house and all of this sociability was starting to grow exhausting. The meal was phenomenal, to say the least, but did little to calm your worries with your husband's current expression of intolerance and dismay. You wanted nothing more than to head upstairs to your shared bedroom and to sort things out with him; to maybe end the night with a passionate kiss and to then retire to bed, finally. That desire, however, seemed like miles away because of the ongoing event that you were starting to despise more with every passing minute.

Not to mention, your dress was starting to get extremely uncomfortable, as if your skin were melting into the seams of the fabric.

As if on cue to make the night worse, Dr. Chilton was making his way towards you, undoubtedly much more drunk this time. He was stumbling over his own loafers and the floorboards were not his friend at the moment. He was making a fool of himself and you wanted so badly to just disappear.

Just then, the floorboard by the fireplace where you were sitting popped up in front of him. Everything from then went in slow-motion, the wood, the stumbling of Chilton's feet and the slow advancement towards the fire. Seeing how this would play out, you wanted to yell "Stop!" but you were frozen. Just as you had predicted, he had a horrid fall towards the open flame, his cufflinks connecting with the place stones and his right arm breaking the fall. His hand wasn't lucky enough to miss the fire, his scream instantly echoing throughout the room.

"Dr. Chilton!" Hannibal yelled, already to his feet with the pitcher of water from the charcuterie table. It was insane that his reflexes allowed him to respond instantaneously. Almost as if he had prepared for the doctor's fall. Springing the water onto Chilton, the fire was put out almost as quickly as it had started.

"Are you okay?" You asked the doctor, leaning down to his level on the floor, holding his now hurt hand.

"B-b-bandages." He was able to muster out.

The closer look you got to his hand, the closer you could see the wound. The flames didn't consume his flesh for very long, although there was now a coating of red on his skin alongside a few open gashes. Looking to your husband for help, you instead saw him standing above you, a scowl on his lips. He looked angrier than he'd ever before and the sight of it scared you. Had he been angry that the party was ruined? That one of his guests were hurt?

Chilton was then led to the kitchen where his wounds were properly addressed and tended to. The aid kit that had collected dust on the top shelf of the medicine cabinet had finally been put to use, and, upon further inspection, it had been decided for the doctor to call for an ambulance for a more professional treatment.

He left. Everyone followed suit. It was now only you and your husband.

"I'm sorry that had to happen the way it did." You said, reaching out to touch his shoulder and soothe him in my way you could. "Would you like me to help you clean up?"

He mumbled something under his breath before he made his way up the elongated glass stairs. It was unbelievably peculiar for him to retire to bed this early, especially before cleaning up from a party.

"Is something wrong?" You asked, voice coming out as nothing more than a feeble whisper. He stopped in his tracks, his blazer now resting atop his free arm opposite to the one holding the railing. His tie was loosened and from where you were standing, you couldn't see his face all that clearly.

He finally spoke up.

"What are your intentions with Chilton?" He asked.

You stopped in your initial tracks to follow your husband up the stairs. Was he accusing you of courtship? And with the doctor of all people?

"Whatever do you mean?"

"You know exactly what I mean, (Y/N)."

Your heart broke for a moment, there was no way he really thought that after years of marriage, after what you had come to learn about him and his... capabilities...that you would choose another man, albeit in front of his own eyes?

"I have no intentions with Chilton, Hanni. Not as an acquaintance, not as a friend, not as a lover." You continued to follow him up the stairs and to your shared bedroom where he placed the blazer and tie on the bedside table rather than hang it up as he usually did. He undid his cufflinks and unbuttoned the top his neckline.

"I only want you, Hannibal. You know that."

He pursed his lips and finally, from where he leant against the bed, looked up at you standing in the doorframe. Your expression was a worried one, not of someone who had underlying intentions. Hannibal knew what you wanted, knew who you wanted, but Chilton had gotten the better of him tonight. And besides, tormenting the two of you to remind both of you who you belong to was a much more satisfying game to play.

"Alright." Hannibal said, accepting your validation with his thick, Danish accent. "Show me."

"I- what?" You asked, being taken aback completely by surprise. His eyes were dark with thoughts you had grown to be all too familiar with from him. Despite clearly understanding his interpretation of the words, you still stood frozen at the door, waiting. There was something about this that wasn't going to be as sweet as the usual slow and sensual intimacy you'd had with your husband and you knew this fact.

Just then, as if taking your hesitance as permission, he stands and walks over to you, the height difference ever so apparent now that you were face to face. His gelled hair was now starting to come undone, as was yours, as he held your gaze. His hand came up to tuck your hair behind your ear and then trailed to your neck, your collarbone, your breast. He then allowed his hand to go further, down to your waist and then pulled you into him, holding you there as gently but firm as one could be. He was watching your face as he did so, never breaking eye contact even once.

Your breath hitched in your throat. A growing warmth developed in your midsection as your husband had you entranced with his every move. He was enjoying this, enjoying you, enjoying the situation he put you in. He had turned on his more sadistic side and it was becoming evident with the way he progressed down your body, replacing his hands with kisses and moving towards your thighs then back up, as if with haste, towards your mouth. You felt as though you were going to faint right then and there.

He suddenly stops his kisses and then goes to finish unbuttoning his shirt. His wide frame was revealed with every unfastened button popping off, slowly but surely. Every inch of his skin had been crafted to the likes of the gods, it was as if he were one of them himself. No imperfections in his skin as far as the eye could see. He was beautiful. He was the divine definition of beauty itself.

He swiftly moved his hands to your throat, fingers following suit as he held you there, against the bedroom wall, a juxtaposition to his masterfully divine beauty of feigned innocence. His breath was hot but not unpleasant as he whispered into the nape of your neck:

"You belong to me."

And that was all it took for you to fold entirely, becoming a puppet to his every command, desires of the flesh being the only thing on both your minds. You needed him and he needed you to need him. He wanted a full surrender, a full understanding that he was the only man you'd ever be able to fulfill these lustrous fantasies with.

"Do you understand?" He asked, not giving you a second to think any further before he moved you from the wall and to the bed, where he towered over you.

"Y-yes." You said, waiting to see what he would do next.

"Good. Now take it."

Confused, you looked up at him but he had already had other plans, flipping you into your stomach and forcing himself inside you, under your dress. The instant burn that you felt was replaced by immediate satisfaction as you saw stars. Through this position you could feel him inside you, hot and intense, pushing deeper and deeper until he bottomed out. He dug into you until he was all you could feel, hear, taste, see. He was owning every inch of your skin and forcing you to feel it.

And you loved it.

"Who do you belong to?" He asked, anger laced in his voice.

"You." You tried your best to get out with the intense feeling between your thighs but it was next to impossible.

"What was that?" He asked once more, forcing you to say it louder.

Just as you were about to respond, he picks you up and turns you around to face him, taking in his expression. You were on your knees looking up at him, tears in your eyes at the intensity of what had just happened. Your dress was definitely ruined by this point but you couldn't care less.

"You." You said, waiting for him to say something, anything at all. He placed his finger on your lips and smiled down at you while he toyed with them. He then put himself inside of your mouth, your jaws stretching to be able to take him.

"Good." He said, quickening his original pace as he sighed with content. You allowed him to finish before the two of you fell onto the bed in a tangle of limbs and bedsheets.

He was holding you in his arms now, making sure you were alright as he kissed the top of your head and face, looking at the marks he'd left on your skin. He'd make sure those were more visible the next time someone tried to intrude on your guys' company. Especially on a pity invite.

He'd also make sure not to let Chilton off with a warning next time, making sure to purposely set his entire body on fire, not just his hand.

But you were asleep soundly in his arms, full of him and he had won.

...

A/N : Hello! This is my first time writing smut kinda so I hope this is up to par with some other fanfic writers. I really hope this fulfills your request! Lmk if anyone has any other requests, my ask box is open! 🫶

[lightleak007]

~ The Legend of How You Disappeared ~

Storyline: Kokushibo thought that people with rare blood are the only ones who can make him feel the excitement of consuming them. But you—you are awakening his humanistic urge that is supposed to be long forgotten.

!! SMUT ALERT !!

!! READ AT YOUR OWN RISK !!

PS. Hi, reader! I'm making my tumblr debut with one of my favorite Demon Slayer Character x Reader stories that I made. Hope you enjoy reading~

During the Taisho period, it is part of the culture to be married at a young age. The age of sixteen is the appropriate age to have a husband through an arranged marriage. That’s why learning how to be a good wife is much more important than learning how to be intellectual.

You had prepared yourself for the day to be chosen as a bride, but your life wasn’t the same as everybody else—no one wanted you.

If only you were chosen and got married by the age of sixteen, you wouldn’t be seen as bad luck by your own family and everybody else in town.

As you live your life for two decades, you are seen as a disgrace, and everyone who knew you always looked at you with pity in their eyes. Even work does not come easy since everyone believes you’ll only attract misfortune to their business. It got you thinking that maybe life isn’t hard, it’s just you finding it hard to live because the people around you make it so.

It feels like you’re just breathing, but not living—you feel empty and unwanted. The only thing that gives you peace of mind is an evening walk, and you developed a habit of doing it every night without a miss.

Even with the rumors about a demon who hunts humans for food being the only talk in your town lately, it doesn’t stop you to take a late-night walk. More like, you don’t care if you encounter the demon and he puts an end to your life—or maybe the demon won’t even choose you to be their prey in the first place.

You scoffed at the thought of encountering a picky demon as you continue to walk towards the riverside. When you got to your usual spot, you put down your lantern on the grass before sitting beside it. The moon is unusually bright tonight and its light is reflecting on the calm water that is flowing in the river in front of you.

“Ah~ It feels a little chilly tonight,” you said to yourself as you felt the night breeze, and put on your haori that you brought with you. Nighttime is the only time you are free—from judgments and the pitiful stare of everyone you know. It feels nice to have solitude and the gentle flow of wind against you is adding to your relaxation.

The cold air of the night keeps brushing against your skin and as the wind blows, your scent is being flown with it—reaching the nostrils of the rumored demon in the area. He can feel his senses tingle upon smelling a human nearby.

Kokushibo moves swiftly to your location, his hunger beginning to rise within him. Just by your scent, he could tell you are a woman in her younger years, and the closer he gets to where you are… his sixth sense revealed much more.

Without you noticing him, Kokushibo stands a few feet away behind you. He couldn’t believe what he could see with his sixth sense, but he knows that his eyes are not lying to him.

Kokushibo can tell without a doubt that you are a virgin.

A thrill runs in his veins and an unfamiliar urge is igniting within him upon knowing this. Kokushibo thought that people with rare blood are the only ones who can make him feel the excitement of consuming them. But you—you are awakening his humanistic urge that is supposed to be long forgotten.

Being a demon, Kokushibo did not think that it was possible for him to feel any sexual urge, especially, toward a human. For demons, humans are nothing but food and power source. Yet when your scent penetrated his nostrils, a tingling sensation runs through under his skin, and his instincts told him to have you.

Kokushibo unsheaths his fleshy sword from his side. Thinking to himself that after he absorbs you, he'll be back to his usual self—being composed and reserved. In just one slash, he knew he could end your life and he won’t be bothered by his humanistic feelings anymore.

You only became aware of someone else’s presence behind you when you felt a sharp tip pressing at your back. A gasp left your lips and your mind wondered who could it be. Your heart races its beat as you slowly turn your head to see who it is.

A louder gasp escapes from you upon realizing that the person who pointed his sword at you, is in fact, a demon. You tilt your face away to see him, he has three pairs of eyes that can’t go unnoticed by someone. His face has flame markings on the left side of his forehead and on the right side of his chin. He stands tall in front of you and his spiky hair is tied in a ponytail behind his head. He’s wearing a purple kimono with beehive patterns on it and partnered it with black hakama pants that are tied with a white cloth belt on his waist. Somehow, you felt admiration for his majestic features.

“W-Who are you…?” You asked as he pointed his fleshy sword at your face this time. Well, you guess this is where your miserable life ends.

Even as a demon, he’s polite enough to answer your question. “Upper Moon Rank One of Twelve Kizuki,” he saw how your face looks puzzled at what he said, “Kokushibo.” He was a little surprised that you did not run away screaming.

As someone who’s tired of living, you don’t feel scared anymore of getting killed by him. It’s not your wish to spend your time growing old in a world that only gives unfairness to you.

“Don’t worry, I won’t run away,” you said as you get up on your feet, “You can do anything to me. I’ve been ready to throw my life away anyway, Kokushibo.” You flashed him a genuine smile—something you haven’t done in a long time.

Kokushibo’s eyebrows twitch, “Do…anything to her?” He thought as he felt the shivers that run through his body, and the smile that you gave him only made his heart fall. He pointed his sword to your chest and he watches as you anticipated the slash.

You waited with eyes-closed, heartbeat racing but there’s no regret creeping into your chest. Then, you felt the sword swing across your body and the breeze of the night penetrated your skin. Slowly, you opened one eye to see what happened—only to see Kokushibo sheathing his sword back to his side.

When the wind flew again, it felt too cold against your body. Realization slowly sank in you as shredded pieces of clothing swayed in front of your eyes. You look at your body and found yourself…naked.

“I have permission to do anything to you right now,” Kokushibo catches your waist and pulled your naked body closer to his. His face inching closer to your neck and his other hand already caressing one of your breasts.

“A-Aren’t you—hng!” The feeling of his lips kissing lavishly on your neck made you hold off your question. You weren’t aware that a demon like him could be a pervert and would do sexual advances on his prey—this wasn’t what you expected. His sharp nails grazing against your back made you elicit a shuddering breath and caused you to push your chest closer to him.

Kokushibo slathers his tongue from your shoulder blade to your neck and it reaches until the back of your ears. “Your taste is addicting….” He paused upon the realization that he doesn’t know your name.

“Tell me…” Kokushibo pulled your chin to tilt your head and made you look at him, “...your name, human.”

“_______,” you answered without hesitation as you hold onto his shoulders and felt your heart flutter at his compliment. Your naked body presses close to him and you can feel a hard tent poking on your thigh.

“_______,” Kokushibo repeated as if your name is something he won’t ever want to forget. His hands ran all over your body as his mouth started working on your neck again. Your scent and taste against Kokushibo’s senses are enough to make him moan. He ran his fangs on the veins of your neck and the urge to bite you is so strong but his sexual urge for you is stronger.

The feeling of Kokushibo’s lips against your skin is ticklish and sensual, both feelings are something you never had before from someone else. You felt your body being guided to lay down on the grass where your shredded clothes are. As soon as your back hits the ground, Kokushibo hovers on top of you and seizes your lips.

“Hmng!” The sudden kiss caught you off-guard, making it hard to respond as his tongue invades your mouth. You can only release puffs of air and let him eagerly suck on your tongue—the sensation is electrifying.

Kokushibo keeps himself busy as he savors your taste in your mouth, not really minding all the saliva he’s been slurping from you. It has been so long since he ever kissed someone and he’s well aware that not even with his wife from before time, had awakened a such desire he’s been feeling for you. He doesn’t want to stop and his tongue pushes deep into your mouth—nearly reaching your throat.

You almost choked and your eyes filled with tears as you find it hard to breathe. With all the strength that you have, you pushed him away and moaned, “Ko-Kokushibo…”

There’s a trickle of saliva on the side of his mouth as he pulled away and the way you moaned his name made him feel a throb in his aching length. Kokushibo wiped off your stained cheek with his cold hand as gently as he could. He’s feeling too much ache between his legs that his clothing is making him feel more uncomfortable.

You watch as Kokushibo undress between your legs, he has pale skin but a muscular body, and your eyes were interrupted from lowering down your gaze when he hoists your legs in his arms. The dripping of your arousal in between your legs is being reflected by the moonlight, and the embarrassment snaps in you as Kokushibo leans in closer to your wetness.

Kokushibo inhales deep your arousal scent—too inviting for him. He felt your hips squirming away in shyness but he had no problem firming his hold on your thighs. His hands spread your wetness open and his sharp nails dug into your inner thighs at the sight of your tight hole. Every breath that he takes is heavy as he keeps himself in control.

You started to feel more embarrassed and insecure as Kokushibo stay in a daze with your virgin hole. But, every puff of air from his mouth feels too hot against your wetness that it’s taking effect on you too. Your soft hand reaches for his hand that’s holding into your inner thigh, “What’s… wrong?”

“I want to taste what’s dripping from you here,” Kokushibo’s knuckles caresses your folds and gently prod your clit unconsciously.

Before you could answer, you felt his flat tongue lathering on your wetness back and forth. The tip of his tongue rubbed on your clit and licking on your slit—causing your legs to spread further apart. Your hands hold onto his head as Kokushibo let himself drown in your wetness, and your voice sounds high and lewd from the sensation.

Kokushibo’s mouth works with hunger and your arousal coating even his chin as he pushes his tongue inside you. He slurps loudly and sucked on the nub his mouth had found—causing your legs to tremble against his hold.

“Ahhh~!!” You cried out in pleasure as you tug on his hair, “Kokushibo~! Your tongue—haa~!!”

The way you pulled his hair is not having any effect on Kokushibo, it only made him groan against your clit, as his tongue penetrates your insides. He can feel the soft pleats of your insides squeezing around the wet muscle of his mouth.

The further his tongue reaches inside you, the closer you felt yourself convulsing. Your legs shake around his head and your body gave in to the newfound ecstasy. You came undone in his mouth and your insides wetter than ever.

Kokushibo gulped all the secretions left in his mouth and he stare down at your heavily breathing state. He presses his shaft on your abused clit and you flinch away in sensitiveness. He had to hold your hips still as he started penetrating your tight insides.

You whined at the sensation of getting stretched apart, he felt hard inside you, and it feels impossible to take all of him. The brush of his pulsating veins in your slick walls is making your eyes roll in the back of your head.

“I can’t— ‘s too much.”

Kokushibo pulled your body up on his lap, to help you sink on him as he was just halfway in, “Don’t run away from me, _______.”

You felt his hands on your ass and your body swiftly pushed down to his length. You let out a cry of his name and felt a searing pain as you fully take him inside you. Tears freely fell from your eyes as you feel the pain—his length feels too hard and your insides still adjusting from his wide girth.

"Please..." You can feel the sting in your eyes as tears continue to trickle down and stain your cheeks, "Stop... Please, stop."

Unbeknownst to both of you, spots of blood from your torn hymen are freely dripping from your joined bodies together and staining the ground.

"I can't.” Kokushibo started to thrust, “This can't be over now, _______."

You cried out louder and had to bite on his shoulder to distract yourself from the pain. Your teeth sink into his pale skin and your fingertips scratch his back, as Kokushibo keeps your body moving on top of him.

Kokushibo groaned internally as he felt you bit on his skin… and he almost prayed to a god just to keep the mark that you made. But, it wasn’t possible, his healing ability already made your bite vanish.

“Kokushibo,” you sniffled on the crook of his neck.

“It will feel better, _______,” Kokushibo kisses your shoulder blade and continue to gently guide your hips in moving. He couldn’t focus on feeling the pleasure as you cry, but he knew that he couldn’t stay still as your insides grip on his length too hard.

Your insides adjusted fully as he keeps thrusting, soon enough, the pain you were feeling was replaced by a ticklish yet sensual sensation. You can feel that it became easier to take him in as you move above him, and your voice lets out erotic moans.

Kokushibo has his six eyes closed as he lets you move on your own, the pleasure in his body is getting stronger and stronger. His hands squeeze on your soft ass and his sharp nails unconsciously left scratch marks on your skin, due to his eagerness. He’s letting out deep groans and sighs as he lets himself be consumed by the pleasure.

You felt like a knot is getting twisted inside you and the more you move, the tighter it gets. “Kokushibo~ Hnngh!”

Kokushibo caresses your face after hearing his name, your face distorts beautifully for him as the pleasure intoxicates you. He wrapped one arm around your waist and move his hips, taking the lead with speed. He can feel your nipples brushing against his face as he bounces you on top of him.

Your hold on his shoulders tightens and it’s hard to keep yourself steady. You couldn’t think straight as the pleasure gets in your head. You felt your body giving up as another wave of surprise orgasm surged throughout your body.

Kokushibo felt your insides squeeze around him repeatedly—forcing him to pull out. He felt your body falls on him and your ragged breathing is apparent. He took in a deep breath, he had almost reached his high, and he intended to pursue it.

You felt being flipped to your back and Kokushibo from behind is pushing his shaft inside you again. A loud whine escaped your lips as you feel being full again, and he felt bigger in the new position. Your legs already shaking as soon as he started to thrust.

“Kokushibo~!! Unghh!!” Your hands gripping the grass and making marks on the ground as you take in his pounding. This time, he felt forceful and relentless—as if chasing something.

Kokushibo’s mind got clouded by the pleasure that he’s spitting out a proposal near your ear in between his moans, “Let’s live together, ________.” He moaned deliciously again, “Live together with me.”

Without thinking about it, “Yes! Kokushibo, yes~!!”

Maybe it was the pleasure you’re feeling that took your sense of logic away, but you know you won’t regret the choice you made.

Kokushibo dragged his hips once more before unloading thick strings of his warm cum and it painted your narrow insides white. All of his kept seeds bursting out inside you and making you full—literally overwhelming your womb.

You can still feel Kokushibo pumping inside you and your body could only take in all that he gave. Eyes rolling at the back of your head, hands gripping the ground, and your voice sounding lewd can be heard from a far distance.

Kokushibo stared at your limp state, while his desire is barely satiated. He took you in his arms and brushed away the strands of your hair from your face, “Take my blood and I’ll keep you, _______.”

You obliged. Finally, you have found someone who wanted you.

Before sunrise, you and Kokushibo are off to spend the rest of your demon life together. Leaving your shredded clothes on the ground and pieces of evidence of you losing your virginity. The marks on the ground and the spots of blood from where you were last night were founded by a man who’s out to fish in the river.

Since then, a legend of how you disappeared arises in your town based on the traces that you left. People believed that you were eaten by a demon as it was your fate for being unmarriable.

The legend of your disappearance was told to many young girls through generations and they feared having the same fate as you.

[dotthings]

The metaphysical aspect to Dean and Cas's love doesn't preclude the humanistic romantic layer, given how human Cas became, how he learned to process emotions from humans. But the cosmic scale of the love is also a real part of the story, Cas's confession is romantic, the cosmic and ineffable nature of angelic love is also in the mix, they don't cancel each other out. Cas is a hybrid of both worlds. But on top of the humanistic romantic love of an angel with human-y feelings falling in love with his best friend who is human, there is that other aspect Ben talked about and Jensen talked about. (When Jensen said it, people were so insulted, but Jensen was saying effectively the same thing as Ben said).

This idea that because Cas is an angel, a being made of light, who is millennia old, who experiences time differently than humans, his love for Dean is on a scale that it would be hard for humans to grasp. And that doesn't make it not love. But Jensen never played Dean knowing Cas was in love with him (his words. Which had nothing to do with what Dean feels about Cas, but Dean didn't know how much Cas loved him) And even as Cas is confessing, Dean is having trouble accepting he's worthy of that love, he is stunned emotionally by the confession, he had no idea how much Cas loved him, and on top of that, Dean is always contending with that dual nature of Cas. He looks at Cas he sees his geeky handsome weird friend that he loves, he also sees a freakin' angel, he's witnessed Cas's powers, he knows Cas is in human, Cas is Cas, Cas is also something so cosmic and vast Dean can't comprehend it. He is certainly going to have trouble processing the idea that an angel is in love with him.

I am actually feeling so feral about this, I've always enjoyed that aspect of Destiel, human/angel love story is such a powerful idea, interspecies romances are also popular in genre. I'm sorry the antis are so mean and twist that into something where they're trying to slam and lock the door against Destiel being possible whatsoever.

But to me, that layer just makes it even more Destiel. And Ben has talked about it and Jensen has talked about it and it's treated like an invalidation and a shutdown. Maybe people are getting their wires crossed and equating that to the intent of antis when they go "Cas isn't human so he can't be gay and in love with Dean" and it's not the same thing.

I just really want to air this. Appreciating the metaphysical aspects of Destiel, which are inescapable and part of the canon story, is not a shutdown or an invalidation. If people regard it as a dodge. Do they think the Destiel shippers right in their midst are trying to dodge? Do they think we're trying to shutdown? I just hope people will think about the implications of their pushbacks.

And mentally shut out the antis and hear what it is that various parties are really telling you.

(And please I beg of you remember that there is nothing "canon enough" that will ever shut up antis or stop their denialism, we have seen this happen with other shows, it is eternal, it will not stop no matter what Dean and Cas do next in canon).

[obsessive-valentine]

Platonic!Mad-Scientist + Experiment!GN!Reader

A mad scientist finally crates a humanistic being, but they are so realistic he can’t find it in him to scrap them like the rest of his experiments. Readers physical age is described just as ‘young’ and later he sees them as his ‘child’, but it’s up to interpretation what they look like etc.

Many things are kept secret by the government such as labs of unethical testing and creations, from mutated virus’ to deformed animals. But the mad scientist always had his mind on something bigger, there were many failed attempts, ones that looked like Frankensteins monster others that looked menacing and uncanny or some made partially from mechanics making them to powerful.

One thing they all had in common was none of them acted like a human, none could fool him into thinking they were their own being. Until you, a completely sentient mind and on top of that you looked normal. It took years to grow you from scratch, hundreds of surgeries to be sure you’d continue growing, inserting mechanical pieces and organic but never using organs or cells from others. You were completely from scratch; a human with no lineage.

He intended to experiment on his latest success and later eliminate them to make a newer improved being. This meant he emotionally was distant once he’d brought you to life, he met your needs to keep you alive and left without a word. He continued to see you as a experiment no matter how many times you tried to get some form of comfort from your caregiver.

You were a experiment to him, not a helpless being new to the word, not a child... until you was. Visit after visit and test after test his brain began to recognise you as a person, something he’d never felt towards the rest of his uncanny experiments.

What started as flat explanations to your questions turned to conversations, bland food trays became more colourful, you was introduced to chocolate and soft blankets. He brought you a floppy stuffed dog one morning after seeing you hold onto your pillow throughout the night instead of using it for your head.

He tried to be indifferent when giving you such luxuries, leaving them behind on the floor without a word before he left or using them as bargaining chips- even though he’d give them to you anyways.

Experiments weren’t as harsh anymore and he rarely made you take needles or medicine unless he deemed necessary. Then experiments and tests stopped all together. He became withdrawn for a few weeks, fighting with his instincts telling him to keep you and look after you, while his scientist brain told him to rid of you like he’d planned.

One night he snapped. He interrupted your sleep, ripping the blankets from your grip and pulling you from the bed by your hand “come on, we’re leaving” was all he said as he pulled you out the door. Staggering behind him in confusion, he took you to his office, it was a mess of papers and files- a chalk board full of muddled writing that extended onto the walls- a small television screen displaying a image of your white cell partially blocked by test tubes and vails of weird colours.

He let go of your hand searching for paper, he found a ripped envelope and wrote on the blank side, he scribbled away -writing about his resignation, making up a story about how he found its impossible to create a true human from scratch, how he’s frustrated and loosing his mind so he’s choosing to leave for his own sakes. How he’s exterminated all prior experiments including his latest, you.

It’s was mostly a lie though, he had no intentions of killing you. You his greatest success, he’s not going to share you with the world, expose you to the cruelties of experimentation in the name of science. Not anymore.

He pins the note to his door, collects the documentations that recorded how he had made you and shoved them in his bag. Before grabbing your hand once again, taking you to his car.

You would be on days long road trip living out of the car that you had both fled the lab with, he allowed himself to grow closer to you, for his instincts to protect you. You both shopped for new clothes and games, stopped the car whenever he saw a restaurant you might like, taught you classic games like ‘I spy’ when you’d get bored.

He found a remote town and almost instantly bought a house there, sold his car with no intentions to leave, and moved all the stuff- you both had collected the past few days- into the new house. That night you watched movies on the old chunky tv left behind from the previous owner, comfortably on the sofa that was beside the fireplace, he had bathed you, cut your hair and wrapped you up in blankets. He had one more thing to do to truly feel at peace.

He sat in front of the fire place, feeding it the documents of your creation, file by file and lastly his ID badge from the lab. No body will know, you will forget over time (if not he will make you believe it was just a bad dream) and become just his kid, and him- just a single dad who moved here to start a quiet life for his child after beginning it in a rough patch. Watching the papers become ash and settling on the bottom; he placed another log ontop “Now, what can I make you for dinner?” he smiled turning to you.

[horreurscopes]

So, I could be out-of-bounds here since I think you meant it as dark humor, but what did you mean in the tags of that 'israel-hamas war' post? I suspect you(and op) are criticizing that framing because Israel is obviously demolishing much more than 'Hamas'(and probably doing a terrible job of actually targeting terrorists- they seem content to reduce Gaza to rubble even if the brass of Hamas escapes). I'm guessing that by saying "joining the Israel-Hamas war on the side of Hamas" you mean, if they're going to conflate Palestinians with Hamas unilaterally, then you're saying, whatever the media wants to call Palestinian civilians- you still support them. I am asking anyways though bc, given reports of increasing antisemitic activity in the US and Europe, I am worried about the potential for blurring lines between the cause of Palestinian civilians and the alt-right individuals who are likely masking their antisemitism in the context of being anti-Zionist. Although Israel's government has been the source of Palestinian loss for decades, (it seems to me that) even joking about supporting terrorism is enough to reinforce the persuasion that Israeli/Palestinian Jews and Palestinian Arabs must be mutually-exclusive peoples. I don't think it's fully rational per se(tho I'm not claiming to have all the relevant information myself, and I'm white US American goyim so like- grain of salt-), but I think that existential fear is the incredible hurdle facing Zionist Jews. (Idc too much about the opinions of non-Jewish Zionists bc I don't grant that they are dealing with the same emotional complications at this time, although that doesn't stop me from arguing w my acquaintances abt their callous acceptance of US/Israeli propaganda.) I just think..... isn't it overall harmful to allow anti-semitic rhetoric, even used sarcastically, to enter the genuine humanist cause for Palestinian liberation? Or, have I misunderstood, and you actually are not in opposition to Hamas, or something else I didn't think of?

hi! thank you for approaching the question thoughtfully and with curiosity, i really appreciate it. i was being kind of flippant with that meme, but this is the only ask i'm going to reply to on the matter given that i am neither jewish nor arab, so i'm going to answer in earnest:

hamas is a political resistance movement with an armed wing, much like the black panthers party was, and like the bpp, a large part of the organization is dedicated to social welfare and civic restoration.

they have stated that they are not against judaism, but against the zionist project. they openly support political solutions.

labeling hamas a terrorist group is a propaganda tactic used by the united states and israel to justify the horrors of settler colonization.

hamas is palestine, a part of it, even if palestinians like any other demographic on earth, are not a unified, single-minded people. to declare hamas a separate entity falls prey to the imperialist lie that there is an enemy to fight "fairly" within the people they are displacing and exterminating.

am i rejoicing in the deaths of israelis? of course not. killing civilians and taking civilian hostages is a war crime, whether it is committed by the opresor or the oppressed. the israeli government is not its people, and many jews, within israel as well as in the US, are bravely risking their lives to publicly dissent the criminal acts of the israeli government. all loss of human life is a tragedy.

no one should ever be faced with the choice between annihilation and murderous violence after exhausting all other forms of peaceful protest and being massacred like animals.

but why is it that we consider a resistance group formed within a population with a median age of eighteen a terrorist group, and not the IDF, a US-backed military force with an annual budget of twenty billion dollars?

i am currently reading hamas and civil society in gaza by sara roy to learn more about hamas and the history of israel in palestine. i'll remember to post more excerpts which i am admittedly terrible at.

but all of the information above can be found by reading wikipedia. investigating with duckduckgo searches (not gonna pretend google isn't prioritizing propaganda, to be fair), and reading reliable news coverage like aljazeera and the many journalists who are at risk of, or have lost their lives, reporting on the ground.

i have also appreciated reading posts from @determinate-negation @opencommunion @fairuzfan @ibtisams and @bloglikeanegyptian amongst others

in conclusion:

[bestworstcase]

Something I can't help but think of is the Great War in RWBY. How Ozpin in one of his past selves had to basically wipe out entire armies of soldiers and people with a single attack from what was likely the Sword of Destruction.

I have to wonder just how many generations of men and women were wiped out. How many settlements of people basically lost their breadwinners or no longer had anyone to protect them from Grimm.

How many years of battle experience and wisdom about the follies of war, just annihilated in an instant. How many lessons that could have been taught to a new generation made lost forever, ensuring that many of the newer generations could not learn from the past except only through a distorted, flawed lens.

I wonder if this loss might have contributed to Atlas' lackluster military capabilities, because anyone from Mantle who could have held the jackasses at the top to account with hardened experience and wisdom JUST. WEREN'T. THERE.

anon i am grabbing u gently by the shoulders

you have fallen for ozma’s propaganda that he is the Main Character of history. and also activated one of my many trap cards (sorry)

the institution of huntsmen is – overtly, albeit not couched in exactly these terms – predicated on the Great Man, the idea that the course of human history is predominately a product of the decisive choices and actions of Heroes, of individuals whose superior intellect and fortitude and so forth elevated them above the common people. this is the fundamental idea undergirding ozpin’s whole thing – his guardians, the maidens, silver-eyed warriors, his “smaller, more honest soul,” the greatness he promises oscar, the way he describes ruby as possessing “something unquantifiable: a spark, that can inspire others even in the darkest of times” – these are his Great Men. the practical short term purpose of the huntsmen academies is to mold children into warriors in order to guard his fortresses, but in the longer term the point of them is to create Great Men.

narratively, this is an idea that rwby does not agree with; the thematic critique leveled against this view of history begins with the inherent contradiction between ozpin’s soaring rhetoric – the stated ideal of everyone standing together as one – and his actual behavior, which (as salem points out, correctly, in her v3 soliloquy) betrays the hollowness and lack of conviction in his professed “faith” in humanity. to believe in Great Men is fundamentally cynical; it is anti-humanistic; it is self-defeating.

we don’t really have time to outline everything in the CFVY novels that leads me to believe that this narrative critique is building inexorably toward bringing the common people into sharp focus as the true engine of history in vacuo – suffice it to say that there are passages in both books which elevate and emphasize the importance of ordinary people working together to achieve greater things than huntsmen can – but the atlas arc already offers a tangible shift in this direction with civilian politics dawning as a central narrative concern in contrast to the insularity of the beacon and mistral arcs.

the point being that the story structure itself is dismantling ozpin’s view of history; civilians are distant, abstracted set dressing within the hermetically sealed artificial reality of beacon academy, and irrelevant in mistral until the instant the lost fable shatters ozpin’s grip on the narrative and then – bam. brunswick farm is a horror-tragedy about subsistence farmers. the kids stay with the cotta-arcs in argus, and it is this connection with ordinary people that gets the kids to atlas, where class tensions between mantle and atlas and a contested council election dominate the plot and ozpin’s Great Man crumbles because he’s still hermetically sealed inside that artificial reality where the common people don’t really matter or exist in any meaningful way.

you see?

(and of course, professor oobleck, the exception who proves the rule: there is no one still living in the hollowed out ruins of mountain glenn, but that mini-arc is the one time in the beacon arc where the existence of ordinary people feels real and tangible and important, and it is because the history teacher says when i look at these ruins i see lives that were lost. i see a failure that must never be repeated. i see lives, past and future, and this is why i am a teacher, because history is more important than heroism.)

ok. so

the great war.

in qrow’s account of the great war, ozma – the king of vale – is the Great Man. the story of this sprawling, worldwide conflict is that the king of vale tried and failed to avert it, and for ten years the war raged on without an end in sight, until at last the king of vale took to the field of battle himself and single-handedly ended it by the sword; everyone bowed to him in surrender, but he lifted up the world by the hand and established a new world order.

no one else – not a single other participant in this conflict aside from the king of vale and (qrow hints ominously, and completely without evidence) salem – has a drop of agency or even a meaningful presence in the great war as qrow, received from ozpin, would tell it. and i do not think that is supposed to be taken at face value whatsoever; none of the other WOR spots are objective. these are character studies as much as they are worldbuilding shorts.

rwby is a narrative that has rejected this kind of simplicity over and over and over again. the great war was more complicated than that. some big chickens will be coming home to roost in the vacuo arc.

so with all that being said.

the historical exemplar that rwby’s great war seems to be modeled after is the first world war. (in brief: fought 80-90 years ago; the conflict was preceded by decades of increasing tensions driven by imperialist expansion and economic competition between rapidly-industrializing great powers; the war itself famously exploded from a single gunshot – although rwby eschews the political assassination angle perhaps because there were only three extant states in the world; the ending of the war resulted in massive redistribution of imperial territories and the formation of multiple new states. i know the usamerican tendency is to forget WWI happened and that ozma ‘nuking’ the battlefield with the sword to decisively end the war is likely to evoke the atomic bomb in the mind of the average viewer, but here i will remind everyone that the united states massacred nearly a quarter of a million civilians and that figure does not include deaths from cancer or long-term radiation exposure. because we dropped those bombs on cities. in contrast WWI was decided on the battlefield with the hundred days offensive.)

the real great war lasted from the summer of 1914 to the autumn of 1918. four years, three months. do you know how many people died?

an estimated 9 to 11 million military deaths, and 23 million more wounded. 7-8 million of those deaths were combat-related. upwards of 6 million civilians died. one of the deadliest conflicts in history, and aside from WWII (in which as many as two thirds of fatalities were civilians and genocide and war-related famine killed millions and millions of people, so many of these deaths were not combat-related), the only two conflicts in history that killed more people than WWI lasted 14 years, and 47. again, WWI lasted just four years.

ok. the reason WWI was so deadly, and the reason almost all of those military fatalities were combat-related is because of when and how this conflict was fought. in 1914 when the war began, the world was just coming out of the second industrial revolution. that was a period when railroads really began to proliferate, mass-manufacture of steel became possible, rise of production lines, automobiles, the telegraph, that kind of thing.

cannons, and things, had existed for a relatively long time at this point, but the second industrial revolution heralded the dawn of modern artillery weapons, and warfare, cultural conceptions of how wars are fought, had not caught up yet to the sheer scale of destruction that were now possible because of this new technology. which meant that WWI was the last conflict where war meant lining up troops on the battlefield and smashing the armies together, except everyone had things like rapid-firing heavy artillery, and explosive shells, and machine guns, and barbed wire, and chlorine gas.

this is what led to horrible, bloody stalemate of trench warfare and the unprecedented scale of casualties and the idea of “no man’s land” – it’s why the cultural image of what a battlefield looks like in the popular conscious for decades and decades after this war has been and often still is just a barren, muddy, completely obliterated wasteland strewn with debris. WWI was the transition between pre-industrial and modern warfare where industrialization had led to the development of military technology that rendered the old way of doing war obsolete. suicidal.

in the WOR spot, those are exactly the the conditions surrounding the great war except more lopsided because one side has a massive technological advantage. vacuo wasn’t even a state, it had no formal government of its own and it was under mistrali occupation when the vacuans rebelled. not an industrialized nation. vale was had probably industrialized to some degree (the artwork in the WOR spot doesn’t reflect this, but “no one knows who shot first” and vale/vacuan forces were reliant on dust munitions – everyone had guns) but mantle was significantly ahead of the curve.

so.

you have ten years of trench warfare – more than double the length of our own great war. you have the grimm, who are drawn to all negative feelings but especially to violence. you have huge swaths of territory that are just annihilated and never reclaimed. qrow mentions food rationing, so there were probably widespread famines caused by the loss and destruction of farmland. and this was happening all over the world, on every continent, including the unnamed continent that is now literally uninhabited – it wasn’t always, there used to be settlements there, they’re shown in i think WOR: vale – for a decade. right

ozma brought the sword of destruction onto the battlefield to break what was either a brutal stalemate or a slow grind of brutal attrition depending how lopsided the technological advantage was – after ten years of what had to be every military commander and every leader trying everything they could think of to force a surrender because nobody wants this – in the single bloodiest battle of the war, which, yes, means he personally killed an unfathomable number of people because trench warfare is a uniquely deadly form of warfare –

but the vast, vast vast majority of people who died in the great war were not killed in that one battle. remnant’s population is a lot smaller than ours – millions, not billions – so it’s unlikely that millions of people died. but proportionally this war probably killed hundreds of thousands of people and i would not be surprised if at some point a character drops a figure like “almost a million” or even “over a million” – like just. in raw terms, thinking about this as remnant’s great war – the historical exemplar is really not. subtle – that lasted for a decade, this is a conflict that wiped out a significant percentage of the global population.

all that said,

the military tacticians and strategists largely would have survived and military historians would have been all over this conflict. lessons learned. the infantry poured into the trenches were not gaining any battle experience other than “this is actual, literal hell” while they endured hours of artillery barrage. the only wisdom that can be imparted by trench warfare is that it must be avoided at any cost because the only way to win is for the other side to run out of men or ammunition or popular resolve first. pure attrition. that’s the only takeaway. never let this happen again.

i think this is why the atlas military immediately pivoted to, like, robotic soldiers and armored mechs and the warships. that is “we cannot do trench warfare again. we cannot do trench warfare again.”

(in combination with radically changing the way you deploy troops, tanks and aircraft is indeed how you never do trench warfare again – there were tanks and light aircraft during WWI but none of them were good enough to break the stalemate.)

the problem, largely, for the atlas military – in terms of tactical innovation – is that in the eighty years since the great war, there’s only been one large-scale conflict and the faunus revolution was an insurgency, which – had to have been a protracted war waged by some phenomenally tactically ingenious faunus because the insurgents won – and that is a completely different kind of ballgame.

strategic doctrine and military tactics are developed and tested through practice. we did not jump from WWI straight to modern warfare, there have been many many regional wars and smaller conflicts between then and now. after a war, win or lose, you can theorize all you want but until there’s another war that puts your new technology or new tactics to the test, there’s not really a way to know if you’ve learned the right lessons and corrected successfully from whatever errors you made in the previous war.

in a world like remnant, where there are only five states in the entire world and there is so much pressure against open warfare, military innovation is going to be really slow. glacial even. stagnant. the horrifying scale of the great war is not something anyone wanted to ever repeat, and you can see that in the development of atlas’ military technology since then. but, as we can see when salem begins her assault on atlas:

the doctrine has not changed significantly. we have unmanned robotic light infantry arrayed in formation support the atlesian equivalent of tanks, with heavy artillery mounted on the warships in formation above. and, in the back, trenches for the human shock infantry and huntsmen. this is still very much warfare in the pre-industrial mode.

the calculation that the atlas military made here is quite clear – pursue aerial superiority to control the skies so you can eliminate ground-based enemy artillery, mass-manufacture lightweight disposable robotic infantry to feed into the meat grinder, deploy soldiers in heavily-armored mechs supported by those disposable infantry bots into the no man’s land to lead the advance and clear a path for the human rear infantry (<- those mechs would be excellent for cutting rapidly through barbed wire, a major advantage over tanks in another WWI-style conflict).

this is a military that reacted to trench warfare by investing in armored ground vehicles and heavy aircraft (✅ tanks and bombers), and by substituting disposable drones for human shock infantry instead of the shift toward evasive maneuvering and detection avoidance that undergirds modern warfare. which is not unreasonable! if in 1918 it had seemed remotely possible to anyone to replace human troops with little war machines, people would have tried! and in a world where a) the technology to do that proves viable and b) the great war is followed by an 80-year period in which the only major conflict is an insurgency, it’s inevitable that the doctrine stagnates there because it’s untested.

no matter how many drills and VR scenarios and war games you do, you can’t know how this new approach works in a real war until you fight another war. the iterative process of improvement is stalled.

and the terrifying thing about salem is she knows what the fuck she’s doing. it is clear that one of the lessons ozpin took away from the great war is that the general public cannot be entrusted to know that war is on the horizon – he’s furious with ironwood for bringing warships to vale because (aside from risking a bona fide diplomatic incident that could inflame tensions between vale and atlas should the vale council take issue with the uninvited presence of a foreign state’s air force in their kingdom!) he’s concerned that it will make people tense.

you know, like how people were tense when mistral occupied eastern vale and ozma tried to avert war by appeasement, and then there was a deadly riot that exploded into a decade of trench warfare. like how things were probably pretty goddamned tense before the faunus revolution broke out in response to humans being – as oobleck very delicately put it – “quite, quite adamant about centralizing the faunus population in menagerie.”

(that’s code for, at best, systematic persecution intended to make living outside menagerie so untenable that faunus would leave en masse; mass deportations and genocide at worst. in case that isn’t clear.)

i doubt ozma was remotely as obsessed with absolute secrecy such that the common people don’t even know there’s anything unusual happening prior to the great war and the faunus revolution. ozpin is a trauma reaction to those conflicts, deeply and profoundly shaped by them and terrified to the point of irrationality of allowing the “energy” that preceded the outbreak of those wars to happen again.

salem hits beacon with three separate and extremely public terroristic attacks all on the same night – she planned for four, but one fired early – all of which were broadcast internationally, live. she spent eighty years observing how oz reacted to the great war and then struck at him in a manner he would never be able to conceal, and (if he’d survived) would have gotten him stripped of power and cast out of his fortress in disgrace. i think her calculation here is that ozpin would either be dead for at least a few years or self-immolate out of panic.

haven, of course, she had lionheart in her pocket and planned a covert operation. low risk, quick and quiet.

but then, when her plans shuffled and brought her to atlas – a military power that has spent eighty years preparing for war between industrialized states, trying to claw its way ahead of the curve so it won’t be trapped in a trench stalemate again – salem made an inexhaustible force of grimm and delivered a an old-school siege, because a post-industrial military that has focused for eight decades on the problem of avoiding trench stalemate is not prepared to handle an enemy force that is effectively immune to artillery fire.

i think the atlas military would have done a lot better in a round two of the great war. but that’s not the war it got. it got a premodern siege by the eldritch roman legion with instant and infinite respawns so artillery barrages just don’t matter. it’s not about overpowering the enemy! it’s about taking away what power they have!

(this, plus the atlesian military’s development of devices that provoke massive grimm swarms as per arrowfell, makes it emphatically clear that the atlas military does not exist for the purpose of grimm extirpation. it’s an institution that has been built from the ground up for open warfare with other states.)

[circeyoru]

{Collection of Overlords} Collector's / Your Design

The long-awaited design for Reader/you! I know there were fanart of Collector!OCs before and I never said those are wrong designs and whatnot. At the end of the day, your design is how you want it to be. I'm posting a design because it establishes that your place in the story. Or confirms it.

If you had yet to read Part 7, go to MASTERLIST and read that first. This is a major spoil for that part.

Name: #%$^% (it’s just the name you pick)

Alias: Silver

Title: The Collector | True Ruler

Status: The True Ruler of Hell | Supreme Being of the Hell Realm

Species: The Cursed Entity | Symbol of Demonic | Everything & Nothing 

Appearance: Height is your decision. Have long hair (as long as it’s below your shoulders) and whatever colour eyes, your eyes turn into the cosmos only when you will it and it’s a sight that only Trick sees. Wears tight and formal clothing. Your eyes maintained closed most of the time, only opening when you want to appear more threatening or intimidate someone

Personality: 

“Whatever you believe is what I made you believe. Nothing is real and everything is a lie. There is no freedom, there is no fate. All is in the palm of the Rulers’ hands.”

You are described to be a mysterious and cruel individual that holds the entirely of Hell in the palm of your hands. You are secretive for you prefer to rule from the shadows and let Lucifer and his family take over as the royalty of Hell, even keeping your information away from Sinners. Unlike your titles, you are merciful and just to those that do you no wrong, you provide for those you deem worthy and offer assistance to your fellow Sins when needed. You are dutiful and knowledgeable with your eyes and ears all around Hell to keep watch over everything yet never controlling and invasive with the information gathered. 

You do display a childish side of you. Some would call it as a two-face or mood change. As you can swift moods in the blink of an eye. You tend to not drown in one particular emotion (positive or negative) as you believe that it would hinder your judgement, a trait that’s more humanistic. So you are more or less neutral to all things around you. It’s not that you don’t know what emotions are, it’s that you suppress them to the point that it is treated like a switch or mode for you to change from one to another. In that regard, you are more interested to hearing souls tell you their tales than watching and knowing from afar.

However, to some, you are very dangerous and cruel. You are indifferent to the suffering of others so long as you have no connection to them and would even stay and watch the scene. You allowed Hell to spiral into the disorder and chaotic realm it is now without doing much but watch it happen. You enjoy the chaos it brings and you do only care for entertainment it gives you, the screams and cries of souls all around are music to your ears.

To your Overlords, you are someone that see value and potential in others. Offering to take them under your wing and care if they were willing to give you their soul. You show obvious favouritism but you don’t disregard the others. Everyone is treated by their merit and worth equally with out discrimination. Those that deserve a reward will be rewarded and those that step out of line will be punished. You do still keep on eye out for former Overlords that is deserving of a second chance, like what you have offered to Husk. You believe that with time souls will change. After all, you watched Noir change to Trick, so what’s a soul to do?

Abilities / Powers:

Immortality: It is physically, mentally, and spiritually impossible to kill you. Unless the user is the owner of holy based powers. Even after killing you, all you need to do is wait for time to pass and your body will be reformed (it is done somewhere none can encounter you)

Cursed Powers: A higher form of dark powers

Omnipotent: As a True Ruler and Supreme Being of a realm, you are all-powerful but has weaker holy and light-based powers and abilities. For example, you can heal Alastor’s large gash, but resurrecting someone is impossible for you (will need Trick to do it)

Omniscient: As a True Ruler and Supreme Being of a realm, you are all-knowing of what happens all around. The reason why your eyes can closed is because you are intaking a lot of information with the eyes planted around Hell

Omnipresent: As a True Ruler and Supreme Being of a realm, you are present everywhere (but Heaven) at all times. You don’t use it on Earth even after Noir relinquished their hold over it. You merged this with [Omniscient] to the 7 tables that displays all of the Hell Realm to you

Realm Travelling: You can travel between the Hell Realm and Earth Realm, but can never enter Heaven

Soul Marking: You can mark a still living human soul and judge whether they go to Hell

Soul Collection: You can claim and collect a number of souls even without a soul contract inplace, as long as they aren’t a marked soul of Heaven

Healing: You can heal certain wounds, it’s harder for you to heal ones inflicted by holy powers or angelic steel though

Remote Viewing: You can watch from a distance on a holographic display of anything you wish without alerting the observed targets of your presence

Creation: You can manifest anything that comes to mind. You have created wooden life-sized figures, knight armours, and your current Cages

Materialization and dematerlization: You can summon and remove objects at will

Power Enhancement: You can enhance and strengthen a target’s powers and abilities by physical touch. As seen when you placed a hand on Alastor and he felt a surge of power that allowed him to contact specific individuals that have a certain item

Realm Devour: As long as a target is in your realm, Hell, you can devour them wherever they may be and bring them to your own chambers

Aura Pressure: You can expand your aura and make it heavy to create pressure on certain targets within the vicinity 

Realm Manipulation: As long as it’s Hell, you can easily configure the lands to your image and make building appear with just thought. This also includes permission of allowing entry and exit of the realm when a soul arrives to Hell and leaves for Heaven as seen when you were the one to let Sir Pentious leave Hell to arrive in Heaven

Pocket Dimension Storage: It’s implied that you keep the bodies of demons that had their soul taken away while in perfect condition without sign of decay

Restoration & Strengthening: You can restore anything that you touch and even make it better. Shown when you fixed Alastor’s cane and had it stronger than before

Superstrength: Self-explanatory 

Puppet Strings: You can cast invisible strings onto multiple targets and control their bodily actions. As seen when you immoblized the Vees

Summoning: You were able to release your Cages from out of nowhere and without a specific word spoken or action done

Mutilation & Disfiguration: You can twist and shift the body of a target to your will with hand gestures or mere thought. Shown when you balled up the bodies of the Vees during the meeting

Teleportation: You can appear and disappear at will, arriving to different locations within the second without prior requirements

Shapeshifting: You can change your form and suppress your aura so that no one recognizes you. As seen when you first made your appearance in the hotel and after being pointed out you returned to your true form. In addition, you are able to take forms of others, like Carmilla when you fought with Vaggie

Black Cloud Platform: You can summon a black cloud under you as a method of transportation and flight, it goes where you wish it to bring you

(naturally the list is not complete, these powers and abilities are up to Part 7. Remember, you are omnipotent here)

Note: Welp, no surprise that you're op. But this just confirms it. How you like this?

Circe Y.

Taglist: (those that don't specify to being in all the works' taglist will automatically be assumed to be in whichever series they comment on)

@aconfusedwonderland @crowleysthings @donustellaron @mistpurpl3 @lucifers-silhouette @fluffy-koalala @plutobots @ray-rook @thealienartist @serenity-songbird @galaxydreamer468 @raynerrold @wen01203@hikari-michiko @colecreo @myromanempiree @xsamkuro @yourdoorisunlocked @clavelina @jono723 @cursedcattalastor @an-idyllic-novelist @flamiohotman2024 @rea-grace @myromanempiree @veroneverleft @lousypotatoes @crazysuityouth @jellyedkazoo @wat4r @kiraisastay @thealienartist @chefysawesomeideas @wtvbabes @patronizingbitch @koshi-kazu @craftyperfectiontragedy @scr4luv @chrollobb @mysterypotatoink @callmefe

[witsserviceablesubstitute]

If nothing else, Dragon Age 2 is a story being told by Varric Tethras (pulp novelist, businessman, and self professed liar), while being interrogated by the Chantry secret police, while also trying to exonerate himself and the best friend he loves...

It could be true, some of it could be true, none of it could be true. Likely it is only half of the picture and the story and its players are Varric's Cassandra friendly version. There's room for so many interpretations of DA2 that I wonder how anyone comes to a single truth about the story and its characters at all?

Anyway, I've been thinking about a post that said taking a side strictly for or against Anders misses the point and I agree. However, I think because DA2 is too structuralist in its approach to the characters, players clung more to a humanistic reading of them. Ideally a story balances both but it didn't in DA2 and so the characters feel puppeted by a thesis that could be alienating at times. I mean, Anders isn't 'right' but he is more right then the story and the general response to his character allows him to be and so anyone with a grasp on the metaphors the DA mages represent, from religious and political persecution of queerness to authoritarian imprisonment, are going to see any attempt to justify the continued abuse of them as awful. They'll also cling harder to the character who represents resistance to *gestures at all that narrative mess*. Same with Fenris. Who is the bluntest fictional embodying of slavery ever. Right to the heart, really. Of course people cling to Fenris. Especially in an American story. (And then they pitted them against each other...)

As for characterization, though, they're assholes. I love them. I get them. I'd like them even if they were worse (and the criticism does tend to exaggerate how bad they are). They are in pain and have a lot of room for growth but they are assholes. Yet they're also flawless to me and that there's my point. The story didn't utilise them as it should, didn't think about them as much beyond being a blunt tool for the plot and so the players who felt the metaphors, who identified with their pain, plucked them away, filled them in, and shielded them from a narrative and public they felt misused or misunderstood them and by extension the people and issues they represent.

We're always saying here that representation is important but this is the reason why. This is the power it has and the pain it can cause when fumbled. This is why there was such a strongly divisive response to Anders— you had one side gleefully feeling justified killing him and all he represents and the other side feeling horror at how all he represents was handled and wanting to save him. This is why there's still Anders vs. Fenris drama years later despite them being mirrors, the story reduced them to being a mouthpiece for and against mages when the plot itself is about the rights of mages. It's a bit impossible to talk about the narrative of DA2 without talking about Anders and Fenris.

So I get it but on the other hand DA2 is a story being told under duress by an unreliable narrator. All the characters could be the way they are because Varric needs them to be in order to satisfy the magic fearing religious government. I think that could be a really interesting conversation to have too.

[animentality]

the main reason ds9 isn't remembered as well as the original series or tng by the general populace is not just because it wasn't the very first trek or the most popular trek (tng's popularity was what really brought trek into the mainstream).

it was hated by Rick Berman, who was the head of the franchise at its height, and who deliberately spited it by never including its canon in other treks.

and that effect has lasted to this day, as modern writers who only bother to watch Star Trek movies never seem to remember ds9 even exists. the way the Pine-Quinto movies mention Archer and his beagle, and trek movies and shows make multiple references to TOS, and newer treks center entirely around tng plots or the Borg.

the way they brought back seven of nine before literally anyone on the cast of ds9.

there's a reason that the damn tng movies had a million references to Voyager, with Janeway and the EMH actually having cameos, but ds9 never even got a passing reference, even where it actually would've been appropriate.

Berman hated ds9 for its focus on serialization, i. e., connected storytelling, rather than syndication, i. e. episodic storytelling, because he was a money grubbing misogynist and homophobe, who thought all the money was in syndication. he hated the writers/other producers of ds9 for going behind his back and doing their damnedest to make quality star trek.

one of my favorite spiteful Berman stories is that in star trek first contact, the 2nd tng movie, he wanted to blow up the defiant and destroy it permanently, just for no reason at all.

and the ds9 writers were upset because no one had asked them about it. so they said you can destroy the defiant, but we're just gonna keep using the defiant and pretending it didn't blow up if you do.

which is why Worf asks Picard, in a completely thrown in line, what's the status of the defiant, and Picard says adrift, but salvageable.

and this particular movie is funny to me also because in that period, Worf is technically supposed to still be serving on ds9, and bringing him into the movie was basically justified as something of a side quest for him, being dragged off the station for a little tng romp.

so you see the crew of the defiant, but... again. Berman spite. rather than letting ANYONE on ds9 cameo in the first contact movie, even though that might've been cool... they just have some randos. one might be Adam Scott.

and remember that JANEWAY AND THE EMH are in that movie.

so berman deliberately wanted to spite ds9 by destroying the defiant, stealing worf (even making fun of him for his role on ds9 in another thrown in riker line) AND snub the entire crew of ds9 by having none of them anywhere in the movie, even though they COULD HAVE CAMEOED TOO, or at least been mentioned...

and to me that's pretty funny, because Rick Berman could have as many tantrums as he wanted behind closed doors, and hate the staff of ds9.

didn't make a difference. they'd still keep defying him, and you know...

not to be a total prick but... ds9 still has a thriving fanbase to this day. tng does too, and so does tos, and star trek in general is doing pretty well...

but out of all the old treks, ds9 has aged the best, not just in how it looks, but also in how it bridges the gap between, old world optimistic charm and more gritty, humanistic sci fi story telling.

it balanced syndication and serialization really well, and had great standalone episodes AND a fun connecting overarching narrative that made the world of star trek feel richer and more lived in. I also want to say that for modern audiences, who are accustomed to serialization more than syndication, ds9 is a far easier entry point into the world of star trek than any other trek.

Rick Berman can go fuck himself, is what I'm saying, in summation.

ds9 will stand the test of time.

and you know what?

both tng and voy succeeded in spite of Berman. not because of him. everything that makes those two shows work, is in defiance of the Roddenberry mandates that both Roddenberry and Berman constantly tried to uphold, even though it was to the detriment of the stories.

[starboltz]

Since a new TADC teaser came out, I really wanted to do an analysis of this post by gooseworx.

To start off with, in the quick flash of new characters we see in the trailer, 3 of them are seen in the teaser image - those being the cowgirl ghost, the candy princess, and the bubble man. The only character we don't see is the frog-looking character.

While not obvious by the reflection, the round part of the ghosts head is likely a hat, as seen in the teaser on the cowgirl ghost. I am fairly sure that both of these ghosts are the same character based on the dress silhouette of the reflection, and the design of the upper body of the ghost in the teaser. (If I am wrong about the ghost's gender and/or pronouns, I will edit this post.) I find it incredibly interesting that this is the most humanistic character yet on TADC.

The next character, the candy princess, has a silhouette that is very easy to match to the reflection. The only major difference is that her gloves and upper part of her skirt are a darker pink, but that could be due to lighting. She is very likely the princess of Candy Canyon Kingdom. If not, she's definitely royalty of some sort because of her crown. I did see a few people think that she was going to be similar to a betty spaghetti toy, but now that we see her in her natural setting, it seems like her arms are more like cake pops. The rest of her body seems to be a neat amalgamation of cake and other candies.

I don't have much to say about the bubble man, other than he appears to be a customer at Spudsy's - where Jax is being forced to work for minimum wage. If you look closely, you can see Jax's reflection in the bubble man's face. His (or it's? again if I'm wrong I'll change it later) reflection counterpart is a much darker blue, which again could be lighting, but it could also mean that other customers at Spudsy's are bubble people. (Also I love how Spudsy's is a ripoff/homage of McDonald's, hopefully it'll make for some good satire of the fast food industry).

While we don't see the frog character from Gooseworx' teaser image, a lot of people theorized that it is some sort of gummy frog or reptile, which makes sense when it comes to one of the other characters announced in the teaser trailer.

The gummy gator appears to be in the Candy Canyon Kingdom, and looks to be some sort of cowboy or guide. He has a white belly similar to the frog, which is why I think they exist in the same storyline/location. Something hard to see in the trailer is that he starts fading to green from yellow around his shoulders. It's hard to tell what he's holding, but it's very possible it is reigns.

Another character from Candy Canyon Kingdom is the chocolate ooze monster, who looks similar in style to the gloink queen. I love the details of candy corn teeth and jawbreaker eyes. It's difficult to tell if this will be the big boss of Candy Canyon Kingdom, or just an obstacle for the TADC crew.

A fourth character from the Candy Canyon Kingdom is revealed in the teaser, and that is the periwinkle drawing mannequin. It seems to be the only character from the CCK that is not made of candy, which leads to some questions. In the teaser it is screaming its head off, so it's likely it is running from the chocolate ooze monster.

Going back to the cowgirl ghost, another cute little ghost appears. It doesn't really have any defining features other than its puppy-like face, but its a ghost, so it works. This is the only other character in the western ghost town story revealed in the teaser. Though the gummy gator looks like a cowboy, I think the ghosts appear in a different location from the Candy Canyon Kingdom.

The last character I haven't talked about is the tape recorder. It doesn't really look like an animate character, but if TADC has taught me anything, inanimate objects can always become animate characters. It's hard to tell what storyline it's from, but based on the lighting, it's from the western ghost town storyline. One of the most unnerving things about it is that it is one of the most realistic looking characters in the entire show.

Overall, 4 characters were revealed for the Candy Canyon Kingdom storyline, 3(ish) characters for the western ghost town storyline, and 1 character for the Spudsy's storyline. I personally don't think all of these storylines and characters will appear in the same episodes, unless the TADC crew is split up like in ep 1. The Candy Canyon Kingdom and the Spudsy's storylines definitely don't, because Jax can be seen in the wagon, along with (at least) Pomni, Gangle, and Kinger, in the large image shot of CCK in the teaser. (I have no clue what kind of gummy animal is pulling the wagon.)

I also wanted to briefly talk about the unfinished location that Caine showed in the teaser. My first thought was that it was a baseball stadium, but after further inspection the field seems a bit off to be a baseball field. Regardless it definitely is set up to be a performance space, whether it be a theatre or arena of sorts. From the design, I don't think it connects to the other locations revealed in the trailer.

If you've made it this far, thanks for reading my theories on this teaser! If you have any thoughts, please comment or reblog to let me know!

[troius]

I just want to say a few things before you get to the end. First up, it's been a pleasure to read your thoughts on the series; like any fan, you have your own unique interpretations and it's always good to read how fans see certain scenes. It's also been fantastic to see fellow fans respond to your posts adding on to what you've written, again bringing your thoughts out more and generating discussion.

Also, seeing your thoughts has made me appreciate scenes and characters I never thought I would -- Yamamoto for instance, who would've thought?! They've also reminded me of why I fell in love with the series as much as I did, from the artwork to the themes to the incredible bonds between the characters. You've reminded me that BLEACH has it's flaws that can sometimes take you out of the story, but when it hits, it 100% HITS! It's a manga that's about the bonds we form, how they can help us overcome challenges and be a source of light in our lives. It's about the ways we overcome grief and the fear of death, whether it's literally fighting your way through it or slowly coming to a state of acceptance as time goes on. It's about the 'hearts' of people, about what they look like and how they're shared between those you choose. I could go on and on, but then this would become an essay and we'd be here all day.

All of this is to say, thank you for choosing to create a Tumblr account and deciding to read the series and give your thoughts along the way. I can't believe you've finally reached the end, it almost feels like I'm saying goodbye to the manga again!! I don't think I'm the only one here who sees you as a big and valued part of the community on here, so I hope you'll be sticking around! :)

Thank you so much Rays! Response under the cut because it went long.

This won't surprise you, but I too have grown in my appreciation for the series over the course of the uh three years that I've run this blog. Bleach has character concepts I've never seen elsewhere. It has moments of storytelling brilliance. It has truly, phenomenally astonishing art.

But more than anything else, I, like you, am impressed by the heart. For a story that's largely about the afterlife, Bleach is shockingly humanistic, locating virtue not in any system of belief, in any group or faction in the various conflicts that provide the setting for the manga, but in people. All people, whether they're our extremely relatable teenage protagonist and his friends, the occasionally sketchy adults in his life, or the various adversaries ranging from evil monsters to supernatural samurai to a regular-ass gang to a foreign apocalypse cult. Bleach never, not once, lets the viewer fall into the comfortable childish space of believing that there's good people and bad people in the world.

There's just people. Sometimes these people want to do bad things, like execute their sisters, or kidnap your girlfriend, or isolate you from your family, or destroy the entire world. Bleach doesn't flinch away from that either. But it (again, very humanistically) locates those bad actions not in the individual human beings, but in our relationships with one another through the systems and structures we've created to organize ourselves.

And yet in the face of the idea that humans do their worst work through other people, that's also where Bleach locates its greatest virtue. Alone, we're nothing. It's the bonds that we have with others that are what make life worth living, that are the source of everything good in this world. And navigating that dynamic, between spiritual bonds and structural shackles...that's really what adult life is all about, isn't it?

Anyhow, my adult life has been greatly enriched by all of you on here. But I'll take the chance to thank you specifically Rays, for being such a source of joy. Your positivity and passion are the sort of thing that makes a humble blogger want to come back for more, and I've deeply enjoyed hearing all of your thoughts, not just on my liveblog, but through your own posts and writing. I'll be sticking around for sure.

[4thofeleven]

There’s a lot of things that annoy me about Picard Season 3, and one that I haven’t seen discussed anywhere is the decision to ‘reveal’ that Picard’s Irumodic Syndrome wasn’t real and was actually faked as part of the big conspiracy.

I always felt the decision to give Picard a terminal neurological disease in the All Good Things future was tragic but felt somehow appropriate - that despite all the adventures and heroic things he did, in the end, he is just a man, and suffers the same frailties as any of the rest of us. Star Trek’s always been a fundamentally humanist story, and so having its heroes die and fall ill from something so mundane felt right. Sarek falls victim to Vulcan Alzheimer's, Yar dies so abruptly while carrying out her duties, Kirk is shot saving a civilization he’ll never meet and will probably never know his name. Star Trek isn’t about being an immortal hero, it’s about being the best human while still keeping our humanity - and that does mean that the character’s stories don’t form perfect narratives, they have the messiness and seemingly ignoble failures of real people.

So taking that aspect of the character away from Jean-Luc Picard and making it a plot point that he never really had that frailty feels like the wrong direction, and just another aspect of Picard gradually moving away from presenting the TNG characters as flawed humans and more and more as perfect heroes. I think it was the wrong choice.

[racefortheironthrone]

Do you think Charles Xavier is a good person? Or, if not, how close to the mark does he consistently land?

"In judging a man like Gandhi one seems instinctively to apply high standards, so that some of his virtues have passed almost unnoticed."

"...Moreover, if one is to love God, or to love humanity as a whole, one cannot give one’s preference to any individual person. This again is true, and it marks the point at which the humanistic and the religious attitude cease to be reconcilable. To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others."

("Reflections on Gandhi," George Orwell)

I've talked about this here and here, but yes, I think in order for Charles Xavier to work as a character he has to be a good person. I would argue that the Charles Xavier of the Silver and Bronze Ages was always a deeply flawed man, prone to manipulation and deception and overriding people's free will in the name of the "greater good." Later writers, in their efforts to write their own stories that seek to make Xavier even more complicated, have had a cumulative effect that eventually becomes overpowering - to the point where the complications are all that's left. As I've said before:

"In recent decades (certainly since Brubaker’s Deadly Genesis, although I would argue you see signs of it in Morrison’s New X-Men), there’s been a tendency to deal with this issue by giving Xavier such increasingly large feet of clay that it’s become an active hindrance to how the character is supposed to function within the story and vis-a-vis the audience. I would argue this created a great deal of unnecessary tension in the fandom come HOXPOX, where a significant part of the fandom was convinced that Xavier was mind-controlling characters who were supposed to have had a sincere change of mind, because if Xavier was involved, whatever he was involved with had to be bad or dangerous."

This becomes a problem of audience buy-in when you try to write stories in which Charles Xavier is supposed to be on the side of the angels, because now you have to overcome decades of the readers being conditioned to the opposite before you can get them to engage with the story on its face.

To Morrison and many of those who came after him, the answer is that Xavier is simply an exhausted concept that needs to be pushed aside, so that the franchise can be led by new characters with new ideas. With all the best will in the world, this was tried repeatedly, and it failed. First, it was "killing" Xavier so that he could be replaced by Cyclops as the new leader of mutantkind on Utopia - only for Cyclops to basically do the same shit he was pissed at Xavier for having done; then in the Carey run we had Xavier's amnesia, the reconstruction of his mind by Exodus, and the retcon of his childhood connections with Mr. Sinister so that he was alive but totally distrusted; then in Avengers vs. X Men, Cyclops killed him; then in 2018 there was the whole mystery about whether his soul on the Astral Plane been swapped with or merged with the Shadow King.

After a decade of attempts to push Xavier out of the franchise, they finally gave up, in part because I think they ultimately realized that Charles Xavier is a load-bearing character for the franchise. Even just as a foil, he's too important to the themes and character dynamics, and if you try to replace him you usually end up just replicating him inside another character.

To my mind, the most successful writers to deal with Charles Xavier in recent years have been those, like Jonathan Hickman and Kieron Gillen, who have managed to lean into the idea (expressed in those Orwell quotes above) that what makes Xavier interesting and complex is precisely that he is a good man. Out of his universal love for all, he will turn the individuals he loves into pawns to be sacrificed for the cause; in order to achieve an outcome of a better world for mutants and humans, he will violate any procedural ethic; to save billions, he will trample over the free will of hundreds of thousands.

And that is precisely what ORCHIS weaponized against him to bring down Krakoa.

[atheostic]

Atheist YouTube Masterpost (Update 2)

Apostate Aladdin - A look at Islam from an atheist perspective by a former Muslim.

Aron Ra - Mostly posts of his speeches at atheist conferences, responses to religious nonsense, and educational content relating to where the Bible gets science wrong as well as an awesome breakdown of major taxonomic sections.

Atheist Experience - A call-in show where anyone can call in to discuss religion. They prefer theist callers, but atheists who need advice on issues regarding being atheist (e.g. family conflict because of one’s atheism, how/if to come out, etc) are welcome to call in too.

Atheist Lowdown - Atheist Lowdown is a weekly secular news aggregate vlog intended for busy freethinkers, humanists, atheists, agnostics, and any combination thereof who want the latest coverage of religious violence and oppression, the efforts of likeminded nonbelievers, and other related stories. 

Cosmic Skeptic - A place for the discussion of philosophical topics ranging from the crucially important to the trivially interesting.

Dallas Wade – A channel with mostly video essays and reaction videos regarding Christianity.

Forrest Valkai – A channel by an evolutionary biologist where he talks about evolution and science as well as reacts to creationist videos. He’s very funny and friendly and his explanations are very approachable for laypeople of all levels.

Friendly Atheist - The YouTube channel of Hemant Mehta, a former member of the board of directors for Foundation Beyond Belief. He mostly discusses news and has a playlist where he discusses “Everything Wrong In Genesis in the Bible”. He also runs a website, friendlyatheist.com in case you prefer reading to viewing or listening.

Fundie to Frei - An ex-Jewish channel on "advice and awareness about growing up with religious fundamentalism and coping in the "afterlife" transition."

Genetically Modified Skeptic - An atheist look at various issues relating to religion.

Godless Bitches - The Godless Bitches is a podcast focusing on atheist issues from a feminist perspective featuring Vi La Bianca, Jenna Belk, Jen Aldrich, & guests. The show streams every 2nd & 4th Sundays of the month at 6pm directly after The Atheist Experience.

Godless Engineer - Focuses on response to religious videos. Also has a “Bible Study” series.

Godless Granny – “Atheist commentary on the Bible, women’s issues, LGBTQ issues, legal/ political and other current events. Intent is to invite discussion leading to critical thinking about religion and it’s effects on people.” If you’re interested in hearing from an older atheist who deconverted later in life,this is the channel for you.

Gutsick Gibbon – She’s a PhD student in Biological Anthropology, so her main area of interest is human evolution and debunking creationist misinformation. According to her, in her channel you can find content  “concerning primates, general zoology, paleontology, anthropology, and evolutionary biology.”

Holy Koolaid - A channel by Thomas Westbrook (a former Jehovah’s Witness) that features news, discussions about the Bible, discussions about the historicity of events in the Bible, and more. He has a playlist for “Nothing Fails Like Bible History” and also often looks at religious cults.

JaclynGlenn -  An atheist who talks about a variety of topics.

JeGaysus – I’m not really sure if he’s atheist (sometimes I think he might be, other times I’m not sure), but his gay Jesus persona is too funny not to share.

Jimmy Snow - A show with a mix of subject material, typically dealing with atheism and LGBT+-related stuff.

John Cedars - A range of videos aimed at dissecting the various teachings of Jehovah's Witnesses, as well as new developments in the religion. In particular, he tries to keep on top of the latest propaganda released by Watchtower by way of video rebuttals as much as possible.

Kristi Burke - An ex-Evangelical who discusses religion and atheism (mainly focuses on Christianity when talking about religion).

The Line - A call-in show similar to Atheist Experience started by Jimmy Snow.

Logicked – “Entertaining responses to bad arguments, with a focus on atheism and debunking religion.”

Matt Dillahunty - Matt Dillahunty’s personal YT channel.

Non-Prophets - The Non-Prophets focuses on atheism and the separation of church and state.

NonStampCollector - Lots of fantastic little animations regarding atheism.

Parenting Beyond Belief - Parenting Beyond Belief is a live call-in show every 2nd and 4th Saturday at 1pm Central dedicated to peer support and guidance for secular parents and those wanting to learn more about non-religious families.

Paulogia -  A former Christian takes a look at the claims of Christians, wherever science is being denied in the name of ancient books.

Professor Stick - Mostly does reply videos to debunk pseudoscience on the internet.

Prophet of Zod - Everything from satirical atheist cartoons to a guy with a static head and no discernible facial features talking about atheism-related stuff. His most popular section is a series on “Dumb Things People Say to Atheists”, where he very calmly and respectfully explains why what the thing is dumb and how best to respond.

Rachel Oates - A channel which deals with a variety of sujects, from poetry to atheist news to book reviews of religious books and more. 

Secular Sexuality -  Secular Sexuality is a weekly call-in show live from Austin, Texas every Thursday at 7pm CT where they talk about sex from a secular perspective.

Shannon Q - An atheist who talks about a variety of topics.

Secular Spirit - An ex-Muslim who talks about religion and atheism.

Sir Sic – A reaction video channel where the host is a cartoon knight.

Skeptics & Scoundrels – A very new channel by an atheist ex-JW. I personally like him already. Before talking about why he disagrees with the paster he’s responding to, he makes a point of finding something nice to say about the person (“Your beard is cool – baby birds could nest in that thing!”), which I think it’s a neat and unique approach. He doesn’t have a lot of videos yet but give it time. :)

The SkepTick – A pretty fun channel of mostly reaction vids reacting to religious videos.

Sound of Science – Mostly a reaction video blog regarding unscientific beliefs.

Suris the Skeptic - He tackle issues of religion, morality, philosophy, and a touch of science.

Talk Heathen - Talk Heathen is a weekly call-in television show in Austin, Texas geared toward long-form and on-going dialogue with theists & atheists about religion, theism, & secularism.

Telltale - Typically looks at cults and religion-related news.

The Thinking Atheist – Typically video essays and the visual version of a podcast by the same name. The host’s voice sounds exactly like an old-timey radio announcer. lol

TMM – A channel mostly featuring reactions to Christian content.

Truth Wanted - A show similar to Atheist Experience and Talk Heathen, it focuses on how and why people believe what they believe, and how you can talk about beliefs in more effective ways.

Viced Rhino - Response videos to pseudo-scientific nonsense on YouTube.