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anominous-user · 7 months ago

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Double Indemnity, Veritas Ratio and Aventurine

This was originally a part of my compilation post as a short analysis on the Double Indemnity references, linking to this great thread by Manya on Twitter. However, I've recently watched the movie and found that the parallels run much deeper than just the mission name and the light cone itself, plus as the short synopsis I've read online. Since there isn't really an in-depth attempt at an analysis on the film in relation to the way Aventurine and Ratio present themselves throughout Penacony, I thought I'd take a stab at doing just that. I will also be bringing up things from Manya's thread as well as another thread that has some extra points.

Disclaimer that I... don't do analyses very often. Or write, in general — I'm someone who likes to illustrate their thoughts (in the artistic sense) more than write. There's just something about these two that makes me want to rip into them so badly, so here we are. If there's anything you'd like to add or correct me on, feel free to let me know in the replies or reblogs, or asks. This ended up being a rather extensive deep dive into the movie and its influences on the pairing, so please keep that in mind when pressing Read More.

There are two distinct layers on display in Ratio and Aventurine's relationship throughout Penacony, which are references to the two most important relationships in the movie — where they act like they hate/don’t know each other, and where they trust each other.

SPOILER WARNING for the entire movie, by the way. You can watch the film for free here on archive.org, as well as follow along with the screenplay here. I will also be taking dialogue and such from the screenplay, and cite quotes from the original novel in its own dedicated section. SPOILER WARNING for the Cat Among Pigeons Trailblaze mission, as well.

CONTENT WARNING FOR MENTIONS OF SUICIDE. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED.

To start, Double Indemnity (1944) is a film noir by Billy Wilder (and co-written by Raymond Chandler) based on the novel of the same name by James M. Cain (1927). There are stark differences between the movie adaptation and the original novel which I will get into later on in this post, albeit in a smaller section, as this analysis is mainly focused on the movie adaptation. I will talk about the basics (summaries for the movie and the game, specifically the Penacony mission in tandem with Ratio and Aventurine) before diving into the character and scene parallels, among other things.

—

[THE NAME]

The term "double indemnity" is a clause in which if there’s a case of accidental death of a statistically rare variety, the insurance company has to pay out multiple of the original amount. This excludes deaths by murder, suicide, gross negligence, and natural causes.

The part of the mission in Cat Among Pigeons where Ratio and Aventurine meet with Sunday is named after the movie. And before we get further into things, let's get this part out of the way: The Chinese name used in the mission is the CN title of the movie, so there's no liberties taken with the localization — this makes it clear that it’s a nod to the movie and not localization doing its own thing like with the mission name for Heaven Is A Place On Earth (EN) / This Side of Paradise (人间天堂) (CN).

—

[SUMMARY OF THE 1944 MOVIE]

Here I summarised the important parts that will eventually be relevant in the analysis related to the game.

Insurance salesman Walter Neff, wounded from a gunshot, enters his office and confesses his crime on a dictaphone to his boss Barton Keyes, the claims manager. Much earlier, he had met Phyllis Dietrichson, the wife of Mr. Dietrichson and former nurse. Neff had initially wanted to meet Mr. Dietrichson because of car insurance. Phyllis claims her husband is mean to her and that his life insurance goes to his daughter Lola. With Neff seduced by Phyllis, they eventually brew up a scheme to murder Mr. Dietrichson in such a way that they activate the "double indemnity" clause, and the plan goes off almost perfectly. Initially, the death is labeled a suicide by the president of the company, Norton.

Keyes finds the whole situation suspicious, and starts to suspect Phyllis may have had an accomplice. The label on the death goes from accidental, to suicide, to then murder. When it’s ruled that the husband had no idea of the accidental policy, the company refuses to pay. Neff befriends Phyllis’ stepdaughter Lola, and after finding out Phyllis may have played a part in the death of her father’s previous wife, Neff begins to fear for Lola and himself, as the life insurance would go all towards her, not Phyllis.

After the plan begins to unravel as a witness is found, it comes out that Lola’s boyfriend Nino Zachette has been visiting Phyllis every night after the murder. Neff goes to confront Phyllis, intending to kill her. Phyllis has her own plans, and ends up shooting him, but is unable to fire any more shots once she realises she did love him. Neff kills her in two shots. Soon after telling Zachette not to go inside the house, Neff drives to his office to record the confession. When Keyes arrives, Neff tells him he will go to Mexico, but he collapses before he could get out of the building.

—

[THE PENACONY MISSION TIMELINE]

I won’t be summarising the entirety of Aventurine and Ratio’s endeavours from the beginning of their relationship to their final conversation in Heaven Is A Place On Earth the same way as I summarised the plot of the movie, so I will instead present a timeline. Bolded parts means they are important and have clear parallels, and texts that are in [brackets] and italics stand for the names of either the light cone, or the mission names.

[Final Victor] Their first meeting. Ratio’s ideals are turned on its head as he finally meets his match.

Several missions happen in-between their first encounter and the Penacony project. They come to grow so close and trusting with each other that they can guess, understand each other’s thoughts, way of thinking and minds even in high stakes missions. Enough to pull off the Prisoner’s Dilemma (Aventurine’s E1) and Stag Hunt Game (Aventurine’s E6) and come out on top.

Aventurine turns towards Ratio for assisting him in the Penacony project. Ratio's involvement in the project is implied to be done without the knowledge of Jade, Topaz, and the IPC in general, as he was only sent to Penacony to represent the Intelligentsia Guild, and the two other Stonehearts never mention Ratio.

Aventurine and Ratio cook up the plan to deceive Sunday before ever setting foot on Penacony. Aventurine does not tell Ratio the entirety of his plan.

Aventurine convinces Topaz and Jade to trust him with their Cornerstones. Aventurine also breaks his own Cornerstone and hides it along with the jade within a bag of gift money.

[The Youth Who Chase Dreams] They enter Penacony in the Reverie Hotel. Aventurine is taken to the side by Sunday and has all his valuables taken, which includes the gift money that contains the broken aventurine stone, the jade, and the case containing the topaz.

Aventurine and Ratio speak in a “private” room about how Aventurine messed up the plan. After faking an argument to the all-seeing eyes of Sunday, Ratio leaves in a huff.

Ratio, wearing his alabaster head, is seen around Golden Hour in the (Dusk) Auction House by March 7th.

[Double Indemnity] Ratio meets up with Sunday and “exposes” Aventurine to him. Sunday buys his “betrayal”, and is now in possession of the topaz and jade. Note that this is in truth Ratio betraying Sunday all along.

Ratio meets up with Aventurine again at the bar. Ratio tells Aventurine Sunday wants to see him again.

They go to Dewlight Pavilion and solve a bunch of puzzles to prove their worth to Sunday.

They meet up with Sunday. Sunday forces Aventurine to tell the truth using his Harmony powers. Ratio cannot watch on. It ends with Aventurine taking the gift money with his Cornerstone.

[Heaven Is A Place On Earth] They are in Golden Hour. Ratio tries to pry Aventurine about his plan, but Aventurine reins him in to stop breaking character. Ratio gives him the Mundanite’s Insight before leaving. This is their final conversation before Aventurine’s grandest death.

Now how exactly does the word “double indemnity” relate to their mission in-game? What is their payout? For the IPC, this would be Penacony itself — Aventurine, as the IPC ambassador, handing in the Jade Cornerstone as well as orchestrating a huge show for everybody to witness his death, means the IPC have a reason to reclaim the former prison frontier. As for Ratio, his payout would be information on Penacony’s Stellaron, although whether or not this was actually something he sought out is debatable. And Aventurine? It’s highly implied that he seeks an audience with Diamond, and breaking the Aventurine Cornerstone is a one way trip to getting into hot water with Diamond. With Aventurine’s self-destructive behaviour, however, it would also make sense to say that death would be his potential payout, had he taken that path in the realm of IX.

Compared to the movie, the timeline happens in reverse and opposite in some aspects. I will get into it later. As for the intended parallels, these are pretty clear and cut:

Veritas Ratio - Walter Neff

Aventurine - Phyllis Dietrichson

Sunday - Mr. Dietrichson

There is one other character who I feel also is represented in Ratio, but I won’t bring them up until later down the line.

For the sake of this analysis, I won’t be exploring Sunday’s parallel to Mr. Dietrichson, as there isn’t much on Dietrichson’s character in the first place in both the movie and the novel. He just kind of exists to be a bastard that is killed off at the halfway point. Plus, the analysis is specifically hyper focused on the other two.

—

[SO, WHAT’S THE PLAN?]

To make things less confusing in the long run whenever I mention the words “scheme” and “plan”, I will be going through the details of Phyllis and Neff’s scheme, and Aventurine and Ratio’s plan respectively. Anything that happens after either pair separate from another isn’t going to be included. Written in a way for the plans to have gone perfectly with no outside problems.

Phyllis and Neff —> Mr. Dietrichson

Goal: Activate the double indemnity clause by killing Mr. Dietrichson and making it look like a freak train accident

Payout: Twice or more of the face value of the life insurance ($100,000)

Main Actor: Walter Neff | Accomplice: Phyllis Dietrichson

During the entire time until the payout, Phyllis and Neff have to make sure to any outsiders that they look like complete strangers instead of lovers in an affair.

Step-by-step:

Neff convinces Mr. Dietrichson to sign the policy with the clause without him suspecting foul play, preferably with a third party to act as an alibi. This is done discreetly, making Mr. Dietrichson not read the policy closely and being told to just sign.

Neff and Phyllis talk to each other about small details through the phone (specified to be never at Phyllis’ own house and never when Neff was in his office) and in the marketplace only, to make their meetings look accidental. They shouldn’t be seen nor tracked together, after all.

Phyllis asks Mr. Dietrichson to take the train. She will be the one driving him to the train station.

On the night of the murder, after making sure his alibi is airtight, Neff sneaks into their residence and hides in their car in the second row seating, behind the front row passenger seat. He wears the same colour of clothes as Mr. Dietrichson.

Phyllis and Mr. Dietrichson get inside the car — Phyllis in the driver’s seat and Mr. Dietrichson in the passenger seat. Phyllis drives. On the way to the train station, she makes a detour into an alley. She honks the horn three times.

After the third honk, Neff breaks Mr. Dietrichson’s neck. The body is then hidden in the second row seating under a rug.

They drive to the train station. Phyllis helps Neff, now posing as Mr. Dietrichson, onto the train. The train leaves the station.

Neff makes it to the observation platform of the parlour car and drops onto the train tracks when nobody else is there.

Phyllis is at the dump beside the tracks. She makes the car blink twice as a signal.

The two drag Mr. Dietrichson’s corpse onto the tracks.

They leave.

When Phyllis eventually gets questioned by the insurance company, she pretends she has no idea what they are talking about and eventually storms off.

Phyllis and Neff continue to lay low until the insurance company pays out.

Profit!

Actual Result: The actual murder plan goes almost smoothly, with a bonus of Mr. Dietrichson having broken a leg. But with him not filing a claim for the broken leg, a witness at the observation platform, and Zachette visiting Phyllis every night after the murder, Keyes works out the murder scheme on his own, but pins the blame on Phyllis and Zachette, not Neff.

Now for Aventurine and Ratio. You can skip this section if you understand how deep their act goes, but to those who need a refresher, here’s a thorough explanation:

Aventurine and Ratio —> Sunday

Goal: Collect the aventurine stone without Sunday knowing, ruin the dream (and create the grandest death)

Payout: Penacony for the IPC, information on the Stellaron for Ratio, a meeting with Diamond / death for Aventurine

Main Actor: Aventurine | Accomplice: Veritas Ratio

From the moment they step onto Penacony, they are under Sunday’s ever present and watchful eyes. “Privacy” is a foreign word to The Family. They have to act like they don’t like each other’s company the entire time and feed Sunday information through indirect means so that the eventual “betrayal” by Ratio seems truthful to Sunday. Despite what it looks like, they are closer than one would ever think, and Ratio would never sell out a person purely for information.

Step-by-step:

After Sunday takes away the bag of gift money and box, Aventurine and Ratio talk in a room in the Reverie Hotel.

Aventurine establishes the Cornerstones’ importance, and how he lost the gift money and the case containing the Cornerstones to Sunday. Ratio turns to leave, saying “some idiot ruined everything”, meaning the Cornerstones were vital to their plan. (Note that Ratio is not wearing his alabaster head while saying it to said “idiot”.)

Aventurine then proceeds to downplay the importance of the Cornerstones, stating they are “nothing more than a few rocks” and “who cares if they are gone”. This lets Sunday know that something suspicious may be going on for him to act like it’s nothing, and the mention of multiple stones, and leaves him to look up what a Cornerstone is to the Ten Stonehearts of the IPC.

Ratio points out his absurd choice of outfit, mentioning the Attini Peacock and their song.

Ratio implies that without the aventurine stone, he is useless to the IPC. He also establishes that Aventurine is from Sigonia(-IV), and points out the mark on his neck. To Sunday, this means that Aventurine is shackled to the IPC, and how Aventurine may possibly go through extreme lengths to get the stone back, because a death sentence always looms above him.

Aventurine claims Ratio had done his homework on his background, which can be taken that this is their very first time working together. (It isn’t, and it only takes one look to know that Aventurine is an Avgin because of his unique eyes, so this comment does not make sense even in a “sincere” way, a running theme for the interaction.)

Ratio mentions how the true goal is to reclaim Penacony for the IPC, establishing their ulterior motive for attending the banquet.

Ratio asks if Aventurine went to pre-school in Sigonia after saying trust was reliant on cooperation. Aventurine mentions how he didn’t go to school and how he doesn’t have any parents. He even brings up how friends are weapons of the Avgins. This tells Sunday that the Avgins supposedly are good at manipulation and potentially sees Ratio possibly betraying Aventurine due to his carelessness with his “friends”. Sunday would also then research about the Avgins in general (and research about Sigonia-IV comes straight from the Intelligentsia Guild.)

Ratio goes to Dewlight Pavilion in Sunday’s Mansion and exposes a part of Aventurine’s “plan”. When being handed the suitcase, Ratio opens it up due to his apparent high status in the IPC. He tells Sunday that the Cornerstone in the suitcase is a topaz, not an aventurine, and that the real aventurine stone is in the bag of gift money. This is a double betrayal — on Aventurine (who knows) and Sunday (who doesn’t). Note that while Ratio is not officially an IPC member in name — the Intelligentsia Guild (which is run by the IPC head of the Technology Department Yabuli) frequently collaborates with the IPC. Either Aventurine had given him access to the box, or Ratio’s status in general is ambiguous enough for Sunday not to question him further. He then explains parts of Aventurine’s gamble to Sunday in order to sell the betrayal. Note that Ratio does not ever mention Aventurine’s race to Sunday.

Ratio brings Aventurine to Sunday. Aventurine offers help in the investigation of Robin's death, requesting the gift money and the box in return.

Sunday objects to the trade offer. Aventurine then asks for just the bag. A classic car insurance sales tactic. Sunday then interrogates Aventurine, and uses everything Ratio and Aventurine brought up in the Reverie Hotel conversation and their interactions in the Mansion, as well as aspects that Ratio had brought up to Sunday himself.

Aventurine feigns defeat and ignorance enough so that Sunday willingly lets him go with the gift bag. After all is said and done, Aventurine leaves with the gift money, where the Aventurine Cornerstone is stored all along.

Ratio and Aventurine continue to pretend they dislike each other until they go their separate ways for their respective goals and plans. Aventurine would go on to orchestrate his own demise at the hands of Acheron, and Ratio… lurks in the shadows like the owl he is.

Profit!

Actual Result: The plan goes perfectly, even with minor hiccups like Ratio coming close to breaking character several times and Aventurine being sentenced to execution by Sunday.

This is how Sunday uses the information he gathered against Aventurine:

• Sunday going on a tirade about the way Aventurine dresses and how he’s not one to take risks — Ratio’s comment about Aventurine’s outfit being peacock-esque and how he’s “short of a feather or two”. • “Do you own a Cornerstone?” — Ratio talked about the aventurine stone. • “Did you hand over the Cornerstone to The Family when you entered Penacony?” — Aventurine mentioned the box containing the Cornerstones. • “Does the Cornerstone you handed over to The Family belong to you?” — Aventurine specifically pluralized the word Cornerstone and “a bunch of rocks” when talking to Ratio. • “Is your Cornerstone in this room right now?” — The box in the room supposedly contained Aventurine’s own cornerstone, when Aventurine mentioned multiple stones. • “Are you an Avgin from Sigonia?” —Aventurine mentioned that he’s an Avgin, and Ratio brought up Sigonia. • “Do the Avgins have any ability to read, control, and manipulate one’s own or another’s minds?” — Aventurine’s comment on how friends are weapons, as well as Sunday’s own research on the Avgins, leading him to find out about the negative stereotypes associated with them. • “Do you love your family more than yourself?” — His lost parents. “All the Avgins were killed in a massacre. Am I right?” — Based on Sunday’s research into his background. • “Are you your clan’s sole survivor?” — Same as the last point. “Do you hate and wish to destroy this world with your own hands?” — Ratio mentioned the IPC’s goal to regain Penacony, and Aventurine’s whole shtick is “all or nothing”. • “Can you swear that at this very moment, the aventurine stone is safe and sound in this box?” — Repeat.

As seen here, both duos have convoluted plans that involve the deception of one or more parties while also pretending that the relationship between each other isn’t as close as in reality. Unless you knew both of them personally and their histories, there was no way you could tell that they have something else going on.

On to the next point: Comparing Aventurine and Ratio with Phyllis and Neff.

—

[NEFF & PHYLLIS — RATIO & AVENTURINE]

With the short summaries of the movie and the mission out of the way, let’s look at Phyllis and Neff as characters and how Aventurine and Ratio are similar or opposite to them.

Starting off with Aventurine and Phyllis. Here is where they are the most similar:

Phyllis is blonde and described as a provocative woman. Aventurine is also a blond and eyes Ratio provocatively in the Final Victor light cone.

Phyllis was put under surveillance after Keyes starts figuring out that the so-called accidental death/suicide may have been a murder after all. Similarly, Aventurine was watched by Sunday the entire time in Penacony.

Phyllis never tells Neff how she's seeing another man on the side to possibly kill him too (as well as how she was responsible for the death of her husband‘s previous wife). Aventurine also didn't tell Ratio the entirety of his plan of his own death.

Phyllis puts on a somewhat helpless act at first but is incredibly capable of making things go her way, having everything seemingly wrapped around her finger. Aventurine — even when putting on a facade that masks his true motives — always comes out at the top.

Now the differences between Aventurine and Phyllis:

Phyllis does not care about her family and has no issue with killing her husband, his previous wife, and possibly her daughter Lola. Opposite of that, Aventurine is a family man… with no family left, as well as feeling an insane level of survivor’s guilt.

Really, Phyllis just… does not care at all about anyone but herself and the money. Aventurine, while he uses every trick in the book to get out on top, does care about the way Jade and Topaz had entrusted him with their Cornerstones, in spite of the stones being worth their lives.

Phyllis also uses other people to her advantage to get what she wants, often behind other people's backs, with the way she treats Neff and Zachette. Aventurine does as well (what with him making deals with the Trailblazer while also making a deal with Black Swan that involves the Trailblazer). The difference here is Phyllis uses her allure deliberately to seduce men while Aventurine simply uses others as pawns while also allowing others to do the same to himself.

Phyllis makes no attempt at compromising the policy when questioned by Norton. Aventurine ends up compromising by only taking the gift money (which is exactly what he needs).

The wig that Barbara Stanwyck (the actress of Phyllis) wore was chosen to make her look as “sleazy” as possible, make her look insincere and a fraud, a manipulator. A sort of cheapness. Aventurine’s flashy peacock-esque outfit can be sort of seen as something similar, except the outfit isn’t cheap.

Moving on to Ratio’s similarities to Neff… There isn’t much to extrapolate here as Ratio is more of a side character in the grand scheme of Penacony, however this is what I’ve figured out.

Neff has dark hair. Ratio has dark purple hair.

Neff almost never refers to Phyllis by her name when speaking with her, only as “baby”. The few times he refers to her as Phyllis or Mrs. Dietrichson is during their first conversations and when he has to act like he doesn’t know her. Ratio never calls Aventurine by his name when he’s around him — only as “gambler”, sometimes “damned” or “dear” (EN-only) gambler. Only in the Aventurine's Keeping Up With Star Rail episode does Ratio repeatedly say his name, and yet he still calls him by monikers like “gambler” or, bafflingly, a “system of chaos devoid of logic”.

Both Neff and Ratio committed two betrayals: Neff on Mr. Dietrichson and Keyes, and Ratio on Sunday and Aventurine. With the former cases it was to reach the end of the trolley line, and with the latter it was on a man who had put his trust in him.

As for the differences…

Neff is described as someone who’s not smart by his peers. Ratio is someone who is repeatedly idolised and put on a pedestal by other people.

Neff is excellent at pretending to not know nor care for Phyllis whenever he speaks about her with Keyes or when he and she are in a place that could land them in hot water (the office, the mansion when there are witnesses). His acting is on the same level as Phyllis. With Ratio it’s… complicated. While he does pull off the hater act well, he straight up isn’t great at pretending not to care about Aventurine’s wellbeing.

Instead of getting his gunshot wound treated in the hospital like a normal person, Neff makes the absolutely brilliant decision of driving to his office and talking to a dictaphone for hours. Needless to say, this is something a medical doctor like Ratio would never do.

Now here's the thing. Though it's very easy to just look at Phyllis and Neff in the movie and go "okay, Aventurine is Phyllis and Ratio is Neff — end of story" and leave it at that, I find that they both take from the two leads in different ways. Let me explain. Beginning with Aventurine and Neff…

Neff is the one who hatches the plan and encourages Phyllis to go through and claim the double indemnity clause in the first place. He is also the key player of his own risky plan, having to fake being the husband to enter the train as well as fake the death. Aventurine puts himself at great risk just by being in Sunday’s presence, and hoping that Sunday wouldn’t figure out that the green stone he had uncovered wasn’t the aventurine stone.

Adding onto the last point, Neff had fantasised about pulling off the perfect murder for a long time — the catalyst was simply him meeting Phyllis. Aventurine presumably sought out Ratio alone for his plan against Sunday.

Neff makes a roulette wheel analogy and talks about a pile of blue and yellow poker chips (the latter in the script only). I don‘t even have to explain why this is relevant here. (Aventurine’s Ultimate features a roulette wheel and the motif is on his belt, thigh strap, and back, too. And of course, Aventurine is all about his chips.)

Neff has certain ways to hide when he’s nervous, which include hiding his hands in his pockets when they were shaking, putting on glasses so people couldn’t see his eyes. Aventurine hides his left hand behind his back when he’s nervous: Future Aventurine says that "they don't know the other hand is below the table, clutching [his] chips for dear life", and in multiple occasions such as the Final Victor LC, his character trailer, and even in his boss form in the overworld you can see that Aventurine hides his left hand behind his back. And he is also seen with his glasses on sometimes.

Neff says a bunch of stuff to make sure that Phyllis acts her part and does not act out of character (i.e. during their interactions at the market), like how Aventurine repeatedly tries to get Ratio back on track from his subpar acting.

Neff is always one step ahead of the game, and the only reason the plan blows up in his face is due to outside forces that he could not have foreseen (a witness, Keyes figuring out the plan, the broken leg). Aventurine meanwhile plays 5D chess and even with the odds against him, he uses everything he can to come out on the top (i. e. getting Acheron to kill him in the dream).

Even after coming home on the night of the murder, Neff still felt that everything could have gone wrong. Aventurine, with his blessed luck, occasionally wavers and fears everything could go wrong whenever he takes a gamble.

Neff was not put under surveillance by Keyes due to him being extensive with his alibi. After witnessing Robin’s death with eyewitnesses at the scene, the Family had accepted Aventurine’s alibi, though he would be under watch from the Bloodhounds according to Ratio.

Neff talks about the entire murder scheme to the dictaphone. Aventurine during Cat Among Pigeons also retells his plan, albeit in a more convoluted manner, what with his future self and all.

Continuing with Ratio and Phyllis, even with their personalities and motivations being quite different, they do have a few commonalities.

Phyllis was a nurse. Ratio is a medical doctor.

Her name is Greek of origin. Veritas Ratio, though his name is Latin, has Greco-Roman influences throughout his entire character.

The very first scene Phyllis appears in has her wearing a bath towel around her torso. Ratio loves to take baths to clear his mind.

Phyllis was instructed by Neff to be at the market every morning at eleven buying things. Ratio is seen in an auction house with his alabaster head on so no one could recognize him.

Phyllis mostly acts as an accomplice to the scheme, being the one to convince her husband to take the train instead. She is also generally seen only when Neff is involved. Ratio plays the same role as well, only really appearing in the story in relation to Aventurine as well as being the accomplice in Aventurine’s own death. Even him standing in the auction house randomly can be explained by the theory that he and Aventurine had attempted to destabilise Penacony’s economy through a pump and dump scheme.

With these pointers out of the way, let’s take a closer look at select scenes from the film and their relation to the mission and the pair.

—

[THE PHONE CALL — THE REVERIE HOTEL]

Before the murder, there is a scene with a phone call between Phyllis and Neff discussing the plan while Keyes is in the same room as Neff. Neff has to make sure that Keyes doesn’t think of anything of the phone call, so he acts like he’s calling a “Margie”, and says a bunch of stuff that sounds innocent out of context (“Can’t I call you back, ‘Margie’?” “What color did you pick out?” “Navy blue. I like that fine”), but are actually hinting at the real plan all along (the suit that Mr. Dietrichson wears.)

In a roundabout way, the conversation between Ratio and Aventurine in the Reverie Hotel can be seen as the opposite of that scene — with the two talking about their supposed plan out loud on Penacony ground, a place where the Family (and in turn, Sunday) has eyes everywhere. Despite being in a “private” room, they still act like they hate each other while airing out details that really do not make sense to air out if they really did meet the first time in Penacony (which they didn’t — they’ve been on several missions beforehand). It’s almost like they want a secret third person to know what they were doing, instead of trying to be hushed up about it. The TVs in the room that Sunday can look through based on Inherently Unjust Destiny — A Moment Among The Stars, the Bloodhound statue that disappears upon being inspected, the owl clock on the left which side eyes Ratio and Aventurine, all point to that Sunday is watching their every move, listening to every word.

Rewinding back to before the phone call, in one of the encounters at the marketplace where they “accidentally” run into each other, Phyllis talks about how the trip was off. How her husband wouldn’t get on the train, which was vital for their plan, because of a broken leg. All this, while pretending to be strangers by the passersby. You could say that the part where Ratio almost leaves because Aventurine had “ruined the plan” is the opposite of this, as the husband breaking his leg was something they couldn’t account for, while Aventurine “being short of a few feathers” was entirely part of the plan.

—

[QUESTIONING PHYLLIS — THE INTERROGATION]

This section is going to be a little longer as I will cover two scenes in the movie in a more detailed manner — Mr. Dietrichson signing the policy, and Phyllis being questioned — and how they are represented in the Sunday-Aventurine interrogation and the prior conversation between Ratio and Sunday in multitudes of ways.

Going about their plan, Neff has to make sure that Mr. Dietrichson signs the policy with the double indemnity clause without him knowing the details, all the while having Phyllis (and Lola) in the same room. He and Phyllis have to pretend that they don’t know each other, and that this is just the standard accidental insurance process, instead of signing what would be his downfall. To sell it, he gets Mr. Dietrichson to sign two “copies” of the form, except with Mr. Dietrichson’s second signature, he’s duped into signing the accident insurance policy with the respective clause.

You can tie this to how Ratio goes to Sunday in order to “expose” the lie that the suitcase didn’t actually contain the Aventurine Cornerstone, as well as there being more than one Cornerstone involved in the scheme. Ratio must make sure that Sunday truly believes that he dislikes Aventurine’s company, while also making sure that Sunday doesn’t figure out the actual aventurine stone is broken and hidden in the gift bag. The scheme turns out to be successful, as Sunday retrieves the two Cornerstones, but not the aventurine stone, and truly does think that the green stone he has in his possession is the aventurine.

This whole scene with Sunday is also reminiscent of the interrogation scene in the middle of the movie, where Phyllis was questioned by the boss (Norton) who was deducing that Mr. Dietrichson's death was a suicide, not accidental death. Neff, Phyllis, Keyes and Norton were all in the same room, and Neff and Phyllis had to act like they never knew the other. Phyllis acts like she knows nothing about what Norton insinuates about her husband and eventually, Phyllis explodes in anger and storms out the room, even slamming the door. Her act is very believable to any outsider.

Now back to the Ratio and Sunday conversation. One glaring difference between the movie and here is that his acting isn’t great compared to either Phyllis nor Neff. It never was throughout the Penacony mission. He even comes very close to breaking character several times, and is even defending Aventurine in a somewhat aggressive manner during his one-on-one conversation with Sunday, as in he literally tells Sunday to see a shrink. It’s very different from the way he was acting in Herta Space Station — like Ratio cares about Aventurine too much to keep his hands off.

It's also worth pointing out that Neff doesn't speak a word when Phyllis was being interrogated. Similarly, Ratio is silent throughout the entire scene with Sunday and Aventurine, with his only “line” being a “hm”. When Aventurine calls him a wretch to his face, all he does is look to the side. In fact, he can only look at Aventurine when the other isn’t staring back. Almost like him uttering a single word would give them away. Or his acting is terrible when it has to do with Aventurine, as he has no issue doing the same thing in Crown of the Mundane and Divine (Mundane Troubles).

So, Sunday finds out about the Cornerstones and reveals them to Aventurine, and reasons that he cannot give them back to him because Aventurine had lied. Note that in that same scene, Aventurine attempted to use the two murders that had occurred beforehand against Sunday to retrieve his own cornerstone. Similarly, when it was revealed that Mr. Dietrichson did not know about the accident policy and that the so-called “accidental death” was not, in fact, accidental, the insurance company refused to pay out the money.

Unlike the movie, this was all planned, however. The double-crossing by Ratio, the gift money being the only thing required for Aventurine’s real plan. All of it was an act of betrayal against Sunday, in the same manner as the meticulous planning as Mr. Dietrichson’s murder — To sign the policy, get him to take the train, kill him on the way, and to have Neff pose as the husband on the train until the time is right to get off and lay the body on the tracks. A key difference is that they could not have expected their scheme to be busted wide open due to forces outside of their control, while Ratio and Aventurine went straight down the line for the both of them no matter what.

From here on out, we can conclude that the way Ratio and Aventurine present themselves in Penacony to onlookers is in line with Neff and Phyllis.

—

[“GOODBYE, BABY” — FINAL VICTOR]

And now for the (in)famous light cone, Final Victor. The thing that truly kickstarted the Ratio and Aventurine ship in the fanbase, and the partnership between the two in general. It’s a direct reference to the final confrontation between Neff and Phyllis in the movie.

I’ll fire through all the similarities between the two scenes.

During the respective scenes, Aventurine and Phyllis both outsmart their partner one way or the other: Aventurine with his one-sided game of Russian Roulette, and Phyllis hiding her gun underneath the cushions until Neff turned away.

The guns are owned by Phyllis and Aventurine, not Neff and Ratio.

Phyllis couldn’t bring herself to fire any more shots after she realised she truly did love Neff. Ratio could do nothing but watch as Aventurine did what he did — he couldn’t even pull away if the LC animation is anything to go by him struggling as Aventurine firmly keeps the gun to his chest.

Neff says he doesn’t buy (believe) that Phyllis loved him. She then goes “I’m not asking you to buy […]”. The LC description has Aventurine ask Ratio “You don’t believe me?”, while in the LC animation Ratio straight up says “You expect me to believe you?” and Aventurine answering “Why not, doctor/professor?”

The visual composition of the LC and the scene are nearly identical, from the lighting to the posing to the way Aventurine looks at Ratio — Aventurine and Ratio are even wearing different outfits to fit the scene better. The background in the LC is also like the blinders in the movie, just horizontal.

In the shot where Phyllis’ face is more visible, the way she looks at Neff is strikingly like the way provocatively looks at Ratio. Even their eyes have a visible shine — Phyllis’ eyes brightly shining the moment she realised she really fell in love with Neff, and Aventurine having just a little light return to his eyes in that specific moment.

And now the differences!

Neff holds the gun in his right hand. Aventurine makes Ratio hold his gun in his left.

Neff is the one who takes the gun from Phyllis‘ hand. Aventurine is the one who places the gun in Ratio’s hand and fires it.

Three gunshots are fired. In the movie, Phyllis shoots the first shot and Neff the second and third. Aventurine unloads the gun and leaves only one bullet for this game of Russian Roulette. He pulls the trigger three times, but they all turn out to be blanks.

Phyllis does not break her façade of not smiling until the very last moment where she gets shot. Aventurine is smiling the entire time according to the light cone description, whilst in the animation, it’s only when he guides the gun to his chest that he puts it on.

So, you know how Neff meets Phyllis and it all goes off the rails from there. The way Neff goes from a decent guy to willingly involve himself in a murder scheme, having his morals corrupted by Phyllis. His world having been turned upside down the moment he lays eyes on Phyllis in that first meeting. Doesn’t that sound like something that happened with the Final Victor LC? Ratio, a man all about logic and rationality — a scholar with eight PhDs to his name — all of that is flipped on its head the moment Aventurine pulls out his gun in their first meeting and forces Ratio to play a game of Russian roulette with him. Aventurine casually gambles using his own life like it’s nothing and seemingly without fear (barring his hidden left hand). All or nothing — and yet Aventurine comes out alive after three blanks. Poetic, considering there’s a consumable in the game called “All or Nothing” which features a broken chess piece and a poker chip bound together by a tie. The poker chip obviously represents the gambler, but the chess piece specifically stands for Ratio because he plays chess in his character trailer, his Keeping Up With Star Rail episode and his introduction is centred around him playing chess with himself. Plus, the design of the chess piece has golden accents, similar to his own chess set. In the end, Aventurine will always be the final victor.

Furthermore, Neff had deduced that Phyllis wanted to kill her husband and initially wanted no part in it, but in a subsequent visit it was his own idea that they trigger the double indemnity clause for more money. As the movie progresses though, he starts to have his doubts (thanks in part to him befriending Lola) and makes the move to kill Phyllis when everything starts to come to light. It’s strikingly similar to how Ratio initially wanted no part in whatever Aventurine had in mind when they first met, but in the subsequent missions where they were paired up, he willingly goes along with Aventurine's risky plans, and they come to trust each other. Enough so that Aventurine and Ratio can go to Penacony all on their own and put on an act, knowing that nobody in the IPC other than them can enter the Dreamscape. The mutual respect grew over time, instead of burning passionately before quickly fizzling out like in the movie.

Basically, in one scene, three shots (blanks) start a relationship, and in the other, it ends a relationship. In the anan magazine interview with Aventurine, he says himself that “form[ing] an alliance with just one bullet” with Ratio was one of his personal achievements. The moment itself was so impactful for both parties that it was immortalised and turned into a light cone.

—

[THE ENDING — GOLDEN HOUR]

The ending of Double Indemnity that made it into the final cut has Neff continue his confession on the dictaphone until he realised that he wasn’t alone in the room. Keyes had come inside at some point, but none had said a thing, only listening to a dead man speak of his crime. When Neff sees Keyes, they talk for a moment, Neff says he plans on fleeing to Mexico. Keyes does not think he will make it. He tries to leave, only to collapse at the front of the elevator, Keyes following just behind him. Neff attempts to light a cigar but is too weak to do so, so Keyes does it for him.

Parts of the ending can still be attributed to the interrogation scene between Sunday and Aventurine, so I’ll make this quick before moving on to the conversation in Heaven Is A Place On Earth, Ratio and Aventurine’s final conversation together. Once Sunday mentions how quickly Aventurine gave up the suitcase, he inflicts the Harmony’s consecration on him, which forces Aventurine to confess everything that Sunday asks of. In a way, it’s the opposite of what happens in the movie — where Neff willingly tells the truth about the murder to his coworker. Aventurine does not like Sunday, and Neff is close to Keyes. Ratio also does not speak, similarly to how Keyes didn’t speak and stood silently off to the side.

Post-interrogation in Golden Hour, Ratio worriedly prods at Aventurine and asks him about his plan. He then gives him the Mundanite’s Insight with the Doctor’s Advice inside when Aventurine tells him to leave. Throughout Heaven Is A Place On Earth, Aventurine gets weaker and his head starts to buzz, until he falls to the ground before he can hand in the final gems. Similarly, Neff progressively grows weaker as he records his confession. Keyes says he’s going to call a doctor and Neff says he’s planning to go to Mexico. And when Neff collapses near the elevator, they talk one final time and Keyes lights Neff’s cigar as the other was too weak to do so himself.

—

[OPPOSITE TIMELINES AND DEVELOPMENTS]

Remember how I said the way certain events happen in the movie and the game are mostly opposite and reverse of one another?

The Final Victor LC is the first meeting of Ratio and Aventurine, and Neff killing Phyllis is their final meeting.

Between that first and last meeting between Phyllis and Neff’s whirlwind romance, their relationship becomes strained which ultimately leads to Neff not trusting whatever Phyllis has to say at the end point of the movie. As for Ratio and Aventurine, the exact opposite had happened, to the point where Ratio trusts Aventurine enough to go along with his plans even if they went against his own ideals. The basis of the mission involved Veritas Ratio, whose full name includes the Latin word for “truth”, lying the entire time on Penacony.

Aventurine is sentenced to the gallows by Sunday after his unwilling interrogation. The movie starts and ends with Neff willingly confessing everything to Keyes.

It bears repeating, but I have to make it so clear that the trust between Ratio and Aventurine runs incredibly deep. Being able to predict what your partner says and thinks and plans in a mission as critical as the Penacony project is not something first-time co-workers can pull off flawlessly. All the while having to put on masks that prevent you from speaking sincerely towards one another lest you rat yourselves out. You have no way of contacting outside reinforcements from within Penacony, as the rest of the IPC are barred from entering. To be able to play everybody for fools while said fools believe you yourselves have handed your case on a silver platter requires a lot — trust, knowledge of the other, past experience, and so on. With Phyllis and Neff, the trust they had had been snuffed out when Neff grew closer to Lola and found out what kind of person Phyllis truly was on the inside. Phyllis did not trust nor love Neff enough and was going behind his back to meet with Zachette to possibly take Neff and Lola out. And the whole reason Neff wanted to perpetrate the murder was due to him being initially taken by Phyllis' appearance, which single handedly got the ball rolling on the crime.

Now then, how come trust is one of the defining aspects of Aventurine and Ratio’s relationship, when Phyllis and Neff’s trust eventually lead to both their deaths at the hands of the other? Sure, this can be explained away with the opposite theory, but there’s one other relationship involving Neff which I haven’t brought up in excruciating detail yet. The other side of Ratio and Aventurine’s relationship.

—

[NEFF & KEYES — AVENTURINE & RATIO]

Here is where it gets more interesting — while Phyllis and Neff are at the centre point of the movie, there is another character to whom Neff has a close relationship with — Keyes. It’s also the only relationship with no pretences, at least, until the whole murder thing happened and Neff had to hide his involvement from Keyes. Watching the movie, I couldn't help but feel there was something more to the two than meets the eye. I knew that queer readings of the film existed, but I didn't think too much of them until now. And though Aventurine and Ratio parallel Phyllis and Neff respectively, the fact that they also have traits of their opposite means that it wouldn’t be completely out of the question if parts of their relationship were also influenced by Keyes and Neff on a deeper and personal level. Let me explain.

Keyes and Neff were intimate friends for eleven years and have shown mutual respect and trust towards one another. They understood each other on a level not seen with Phyllis and Neff. Even after hearing Neff confess his crimes through the dictaphone (and eventually standing in the same room while Neff confessed), he still cared for the other man, and stayed with him when Neff collapsed at the front door. The only reason Keyes hadn’t deduced that it was Neff who was behind the murder was because he had his absolute trust in him. Keyes is also Neff’s boss, and they are always seen exchanging playful banter when they are on screen together. Neff even says the words “I love you, too” twice in the movie — first at the beginning and second at the end, as the final line. There’s also the persistent theme of Neff lighting Keyes’ cigarettes (which happens in every scene where they are face-to-face), except in the end where it’s Keyes who lights Neff’s.

Doesn’t that sound familiar? Mutual respect, caring too much about the other person, the immense amount of trust… Ratio says he’s even the manager of the Penacony project (which may or may not be a lie), and despite their banter being laced with them acting as “enemies”, you can tell that in Dewlight Pavilion pre-Sunday confrontation that Aventurine genuinely likes Ratio’s company and believes him to be a reliable person. From the way he acts carefree in his words to the thoughts in his head, as seen in the mission descriptions for Double Indemnity. Their interactions in that specific mission are possibly the closest thing to their normal way of speaking that we get to see on Penacony.

Not to mention, this is the way Neff describes Keyes. He even says (not in the script) “you never fooled me with your song and dance, not for a second.” Apart from the line about the cigar ashes, doesn’t this ring a bell to a certain doctor? “Jerk” with a heart of gold?

After solving the puzzle with the statues, Ratio jokingly offers Aventurine to join the Genius Society. Aventurine then goes "Really? I thought you’ve given up on that already", and then Ratio says it was, in fact, a joke. Solving the puzzle through brute force has Ratio telling Aventurine that the Council of Mundanites (which Ratio himself is a part of) should consider him a member. In the movie, where the scene with the phone call with Neff and Phyllis reiterating details of their plan happens, Keyes actually offered Neff a better job (specifically a desk job, as Keyes’ assistant). The two pairs saw the other as smart, equals, and were invested in each other’s careers one way or another.

Because of all this, the character parallels for this side of the relationship are as follows:

Aventurine - Walter Neff

Veritas Ratio - Barton Keyes

With the way I’ve talked about how Aventurine and Ratio take from both leads in terms, it does fit to say that Aventurine is Neff, and Ratio is Keyes in this layer of their relationship. Since we’re on the topic of Keyes, let me also go through some similarities with him and Ratio specifically.

Keyes says the words “dimwitted amateurs” in his first on-screen conversation with Neff. You can’t have Dr. Ratio without him talking about idiocy in some way.

Keyes almost only appears in the movie in relation to Neff, and barring a single interaction in Neff’s house, is also only seen in the office. Same with Phyllis, Ratio also only ever appears regarding Aventurine.

Keyes genuinely wanted the best for Neff, even offering to celebrate with him when he thought the case truly had been busted wide open by forces when Zachette entered the picture. You could say the same for Ratio, as he hoped that Aventurine wouldn’t dwell on the past according to his response on Aventurine’s Interview, as well as telling him to “stay alive/live on (CN)” and wishing him the best of luck in his Doctor’s Advice note.

Whether or not you believe that there was more going on with Neff and Keyes is up to you, but what matters is that the two were very close. Just like Ratio and Aventurine.

—

[THE ORIGINAL FILM ENDING]

Something that I hadn’t seen brought up is the original ending of Double Indemnity, where Neff is executed in a gas chamber while Keyes watches on, shocked, and afterwards leaves somberly. The ending was taken out because they were worried about the Hays Code, but I felt it was important to bring it up, because in a way, you can kind of see the Sunday interrogation scene as Sunday sending Aventurine to his death in seventeen system hours. And Ratio doesn’t speak at all in that scene, and Keyes doesn’t either according to the script.

Another thing that’s noteworthy is that Wilder himself said “the story was about the two guys” in Conversations with Wilder. The two guys in question are Keyes and Neff.

—

[THE NOVEL]

With the original film ending covered, now it is time to bring up the novel by James M. Cain. I bought the book just to read about the differences between the adaptation and the original source material, and to list a few more similarities and opposites I could gather. For this section alone, due to the changes in the (last) names of certain characters, I will be referring to Walter Huff (Neff in the movie) as Walter, and Mr. Dietrichson as Nirdlinger. The plot is pretty much the same as the movie’s apart from a couple of changes so there isn’t a need to recount everything.

From my two read-throughs of the novel, these are the following passages that stood out to me the most. Starting with Aventurine:

Walter, as a top businessman of the company, knows how to sway a deal and to get what he truly wants with what the other gives him. Aventurine is the same, reliant on his intuition, experience and whatever information he has on the table to claim the win. Him luring out Sparkle in Heaven Is A Place On Earth and his conversation with Acheron in the Nihility is indicative of that.

• "But you sell as many people as I do, you don't go by what they say. You feel it, how the deal is going. And after a while I knew this woman didn't care anything about the Automobile Club. Maybe the husband did, but she didn't. There was something else, and this was nothing but a stall. I figured it would be some kind of a proposition to split the commission, maybe so she could get a ten-spot out of it without the husband knowing. There's plenty of that going on. And I was just wondering what I would say to her."

Phyllis, like in the movie, had been hiding her true intentions of talking to Walter in their first conversations, always saying things that she didn’t actually mean. In a similar vein, Aventurine consistently says stuff but almost never truly means any of it, which is all part of his façade.

• "And I could feel it again, that she wasn't saying what she meant. It was the same as it was the first afternoon I met her, that there was something else, besides what she was telling me. And I couldn't shake it off, that I had to call it on her."

When discussing the murder plan with Phyllis, Walter makes this comment, kind of like how Aventurine seems to operate in a way where he has a plan, but is ready to improvise and think fast when needed.

• "And then it's one of those things where you've got to watch for your chance, and you can't plan it in advance, and know where you're going to come out to the last decimal point."

Remember the roulette wheel line from the movie? In the novel, the gambling metaphor that Walter makes about the insurance business goes on for two paragraphs, mentioning a gambling wheel, stack of chips, a place with a big casino and the little ivory ball, even about a bet on the table. Walter also talks about how he thinks of tricks at night after being in the business for so long, and how he could game the system. Needless to say, insanely reminiscent of Aventurine.

• "You think I’m nuts? All right, maybe I am. But you spend fifteen years in the business I’m in, and maybe a little better than that, it’s the friend of the widow, the orphan, and the needy in time of trouble? It’s not. It’s the biggest gambling wheel in the world. It don’t look like it, but it is, from the way they figure the percentage on the oo to the look on their face when they cash your chips. You bet that your house will burn down, they bet it won’t, that’s all. What fools you is that you didn’t want your house to burn down when you made the bet, and so you forget it’s a bet. To them, a bet is a bet, and a hedge bet don’t look any different than any other bet. But there comes a time, maybe, when you do want your house to burn down, when the money is worth more than the house. And right there is where the trouble starts." • "Alright, I’m an agent. I’m a croupier in that game. I know all their tricks, I lie awake thinking up tricks, so I’ll be ready for them when they come at me. And then one night I think up a trick, and get to thinking I could crook the wheel myself if I could only put a plant out there to put down my bet." • "I had seen so many houses burned down, so many cars wrecked, so many corpses with blue holes in their temples, so many awful things that people had pulled to crook the wheel, that that stuff didn’t seem real to me anymore. If you don’t understand that, go to Monte Carlo or some other place where there’s a big casino, sit at a table, and watch the face of the man that spins the little ivory ball. After you’ve watched it a while, ask yourself how much he would care if you went out and plugged yourself in the head. His eyes might drop when he heard the shot, but it wouldn’t be from the worry whether you lived or died. It would be to make sure you didn’t leave a bet on the table, that he would have to cash for your estate. No, he wouldn’t care."

Returning home from the murder, Walter attempted to pray, but was unable to do it. Some time passed and after speaking to Phyllis, he prayed. Aventurine presumably hadn’t done the prayer ever since the day of the massacre, and the first time he does it again, he does it with his child self.

• "I went to the dining room and took a drink. I took another drink. I started mumbling to myself, trying to get so I could talk. I had to have something to mumble. I thought of the Lord's Prayer. I mumbled that, a couple of times. I tried to mumble it another time, and couldn't remember how it went." • "That night I did something I hadn’t done in years. I prayed."

Phyllis in the book is much more inclined towards death than her movie version, even thinking of herself as a personification of death. She’s killed ten other people (including infants) prior to the events of the novel. Something to keep in mind as Aventurine had mentioned several times that he attempted to kill himself in the dream, plus his leadup to his “grandest death”. Just like Phyllis, he’s even killed at least a few people before, though the circumstances of that were less on his own volition and more so for the sake of his survival (i.e. the death game in the maze involving the 34 other slaves where he was the winner and another time where he murdered his own master). Instead of Phyllis playing the active role of Death towards everybody else, Aventurine himself dances with Death with every gamble, every time his luck comes into play. Danse Macabre.

• "But there’s something in me, I don’t know what. Maybe I’m crazy. But there’s something in me that loves Death. I think of myself as Death, sometimes." • "Walter, The time has come. For me to meet my bridegroom [Death]. The only one I ever loved."

Moving on to Ratio:

Walter says several times that it’s hard to get along with Keyes, and how he says nice things after getting you all worked up. A hard-headed man to get along with, but damn good at his job. Sound like someone familiar?

• "That would be like Keyes, that even when he wanted to say something nice to you, he had to make you sore first." • "It makes your head ache to be around him, but he’s the best claim man on the Coast, and he was the one I was afraid of."

Keyes sees Walter as smarter than half the fools in the company. Ratio can only stand the company of Aventurine in regards to the IPC.

• "Walter, I'm not beefing with you. I know you said he ought to be investigated. I've got your memo right here on my desk. That's what I wanted to tell you. If other departments of this company would show half the sense that you show—" • "Oh, he confessed. He's taking a plea tomorrow morning, and that ends it. But my point is, that if you, just by looking at that man, could have your suspicions, why couldn't they—! Oh well, what's the use? I just wanted you to know it."

After going on a rant about the H.S. Nirdlinger case (Phyllis’ husband) and how Norton is doing a horrible job, he ends it by saying that it’s sheer stupidity. “Supreme idiocy”, anybody?

• "You can’t take many body blows like this and last. Holy smoke. Fifty thousand bucks, and all from dumbness. Just sheer, willful, stupidity!"

Phyllis’ former occupation as a nurse is more elaborated on, including her specialization — pulmonary diseases. One of Ratio’s crowning achievements is curing lithogenesis, the “King of Diseases”.

• "She’s one of the best nurses in the city of Los Angeles. […] She’s a nurse, and she specialized in pulmonary diseases. She would know the time of crisis, almost to a minute, as well as any doctor would."

As for the murder scheme, they talk about it a lot more explicitly in the novel. Specifically, Walter mentions how a single person cannot get away with it and that it requires more people to be involved. How everything is known to the party committing the crime, but not the victim. And most importantly: Audacity.

"Say, this is a beauty, if I do say it myself. I didn't spend all this time in the business for nothing, did I? Listen, he knows all about this policy, and yet he don't know a thing about it. He applies for it, in writing, and yet he don't apply for it. He pays me for it with his own check, and yet he don't pay me. He has an accident happen to him and yet he don't have an accident happen to him. He gets on the train, and yet he don't get on it."

"The first is, help. One person can't get away with it, that is unless they're going to admit it and plead the unwritten law or something. It takes more than one. The second is, the time, the place, the way, all known in advance—to us, but not him. The third is, audacity. That's the one that all amateur murderers forget. They know the first two, sometimes, but that third, only a professional knows. There comes a time in any murder when the only thing that can see you through is audacity, and I can't tell you why."

"And if we want to get away with it, we've got to do it the way they do it, […]" "Be bold?" "Be bold. It's the only way."

"I still don't know—what we're going to do." "You'll know. You'll know in plenty of time."

"We were right up with it, the moment of audacity that has to be be part of any successful murder."

It fits the situation that Aventurine and Ratio find themselves in extremely well: For the first point— Aventurine would not be able to get away with simply airing out details by himself, as that would immediately cast suspicion on him. Having another person accompany him who not only isn’t really a part of the IPC in name (as the IPC and The Family have a strenuous relationship) but would probably be able to get closer to Sunday because of that means they can simply bounce off each other without risking as much suspicion with a one-man army. Which is exactly what Ratio and Aventurine do in the conversations they have on Penacony. Secondly — they knew how Sunday operates: as a control freak, he leaves no stone unturned, which is how he became Head of the Oak Family, so their acting required them to give off the impression that a. they hated each other, b. Ratio would go against Aventurine’s wishes and expose him in return for knowledge, c. there were only the two Cornerstones that were hidden. This would give Sunday the illusion of control, and lead to Sunday to lower his guard long enough for Aventurine to take the gift money in the end. The pair knew this in advance, but not Sunday. And thirdly — the plan hinged on a high-level of risk. From breaking the Aventurine Cornerstone, to hoping that Sunday wouldn’t find it in the gift bag, to not telling Ratio what the true plan is (meaning Ratio had to figure it out on his own later on), to Sunday even buying Ratio’s story, it was practically the only way they could go about it. “Charming audacity”, indeed.

An interesting aspect about the novel is that the ending of the novel is divergent from the movie’s final cut and the original ending: Phyllis and Walter commit suicide during a ferry ride to Mexico. The main reason this was changed for the movie was because of the Hays Code, and they wouldn’t allow a double suicide to be screened without reprecussions for criminals. There’s also a bunch of other aspects that differentiate the novel from the movie (no narration-confession as the confession happens in a hospital, less characterization for Keyes and instead a bigger focus on Lola and her boyfriend, the focus on the murderous aspect of Walter and Phyllis’ relationship instead of actual romance, Walter falling in love with Lola (with an unfortunately large age gap attached), etc.)

As for the ending, this wouldn’t even be the first romance media reference related to Aventurine and Ratio where both the leads die, with the other being The Happy Prince and San Junipero (in relation to the EN-only Heaven Is A Place On Earth reference), which I normally would chalk up as a coincidence, though with the opposite line-of-thought I have going on here (and the fact that it’s three out of four media references where the couple die at the end…), I think it’s reasonable to say that Ratio and Aventurine will get that happy ending. Subverting expectations, hopefully.

—

[THE HAYS CODE — LGBT CENSORSHIP IN CHINA]

I’ve brought up the Hays code twice now in the previous two sections, but I haven’t actually explained what exactly it entails.

The Hays Code (also known as the Motion Picture Production Code) is a set of rules and guidelines imposed on all American films from around 1934 to 1968, intended to make films less scandalous, morally acceptable and more “safe” for the general audiences. Some of the “Don’ts” and “Be Carefuls” include but are not limited to…

(Don’t) Pointed profanity

(Don’t) Inference of sex perversion (which includes homosexuality)

(Don’t) Nudity

(Be Careful) Sympathy for criminals

(Be Careful) Use of firearms

(Be Careful) Man and woman in bed together

What does this have to do with a Chinese gacha game released in 2023? If you know a little bit about miHoYo’s past, you would know that pre-censorship laws being upheld to a much stronger and stricter degree, they had no problem showcasing their gay couples in Guns Girl Z (Honkai Gakuen 2/GGZ) and Honkai Impact 3rd, with the main three being Bronya/Seele, Kiana/Mei (admittedly the latter one is a more recent example, from 2023), and Sakura/Kallen. Ever since the Bronya and Seele kiss, censorship in regards to LGBT content ramped up, causing the kiss to be removed on the CN side, and they had to lay low with the way they present two same-sex characters who are meant to be together. They can’t explicitly say that two female or male characters are romantically involved, but they can lace their dynamics with references for those “in the know” — Subtext. Just enough to imply something more but not too much that they get censored to hell and back.

So what I’m getting at is this: The trouble that Double Indemnity had to go through in order to be made while also keeping the dialogue of Phyllis and Neff as flirtatious as they could under the Hays Code among other things is quite similar to the way Ratio and Aventurine are presented as of now. We never see them interact outside of Penacony (at least up until 2.2, when this post was drafted), so we can only infer those interactions specifically until they actually talk without the fear of being found out by Sunday. But, there’s still some small moments scattered here and there, such as when Aventurine goes near Ratio in the Dewlight Pavilion Sandpit, he exclaims that “the view here is breathtaking” (he can only see Ratio’s chest from that distance) and that Ratio could “easily squash [him] with just a pinch”. Ratio then goes “If that is your wish, I will do so without a moment’s hesitation.” Not to mention the (in)famous “Doctor, you’re huge!” quote.

It’s not a coincidence that Ratio and Aventurine have three explicit references to romance media (Double Indemnity, Spellbound, Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince), possibly even four if you take the EN-only Heaven Is A Place On Earth as a reference to Black Mirror’s San Junipero. It’s not a coincidence that the storylines or characters of said references parallel the pairing, from surface-level to deep cuts. It’s not a coincidence that the CN voice actors were asked to “tone it down” by the voice director when it came to their chemistry. It’s not a coincidence that Aventurine has only flirted with (three) men throughout Penacony, even referring to a Bloodhound NPC as a “hunk of a man” inside his thoughts, all the while ignoring Himeko and Robin when it came to their looks — women who are known across the cosmos with a myriad of adoring fans. There are so many other so-called “coincidences” related to the two that you could make an iceberg just based on versions 2.0-2.2 as well as content miHoYo themselves have put out on social media. They absolutely knew what they were doing, and were trying to get their point across through subtle means — the extent they went to with the Double Indemnity reference while also keeping it under wraps from a “surface” level point of view is proof of this — the implications are there if you take the time to look for them, and are simply hard to ignore or deny once you do find them.

—

[CONCLUSION]

This was supposed to be short considering the other analyses I’ve seen were also pretty short in comparison, but I couldn’t get the movie out of my head and ended up getting carried away in the brainrot. I hope you could follow along with my line of thinking, even with the absurd length of this post, and the thirty-image limit. I tried to supplement context with some links to videos and wiki pages among other sources wherever I can to get around it.

I will end it with this though — the love in the movie turned out to be fake and a farce, going off track from what was a passionate romance in the beginning because of the murder scheme. Meanwhile, the whole reason why Ratio and Aventurine can pull off whatever they want is because of their immense trust in one another. What was initially shown to be distrust in the Final Victor LC grew into something more, for Ratio, someone who would have never put faith into mere chance and probability before this, put his trust in Aventurine, of all people.

TL;DR — (I get it, it’s over ten thousand words.)

Not only is the relationship between Neff and Phyllis represented in the deception and acting side of Ratio and Aventurine, but the real and trusting side is shown in Neff and Keyes. They have a fascinating, multi-layered dynamic that is extremely fun to pick apart once you realise what’s going on underneath the bickering and “hatred” they display.

Many thanks to Manya again for making the original thread on the movie. I wouldn’t be here comparing the game and movie myself if it weren’t for that.

By the way, I really do believe that Shaoji totally watched this movie at least once and really wanted that Double Indemnity AU for his OCs. I know exactly how it feels.

—

Other points I'd like to mention that didn't fit anywhere else in the main analysis and/or don’t hold much significance, have nothing to do with the Penacony mission, or may even be considered reaching (...if some of the other points weren’t). Just some potentially interesting side bits.

Phyllis honks three times to signal Neff to go for the kill. That, and the three gunshots in the confrontation. Aventurine is all about the number three.

The height difference Aventurine and Ratio have going on is close to Phyllis and Neff’s.

Phyllis had killed her husband’s previous wife and went on to marry Mr. Dietrichson, pretty much taking the wife’s place. Aventurine killed his previous master, and had taken certain attributes from him like his wristwatch and the rings on his hand and the “all or nothing” mantra.

When calling Ratio a wretch (bastard), Aventurine smiles for a moment. This is exclusive to the EN, KR and JP voiceovers, as in CN, he does not smile at all. (Most definitely a quirk from the AI they use for lip syncing, but the smile is something that’s been pointed out quite a few times so I thought I’d mention it here.)

Sunday specifically says in the CN version that he knew of Aventurine's plans the moment Aventurine left the mansion, meaning that he realized he had been played the fool the moment Ratio and Aventurine talked in Golden Hour

In the description for the "All or Nothing" consumable, teenage Aventurine says this specific line: "Temptation is a virtue for mortals, whereas hesitation proves to be a fatal flaw for gamblers." According to Ratio, this is Aventurine's motto - he says as such in Aventurine's Keeping Up With Star Rail episode. Note that in the anan interview he explicitly says he does not have a motto, and yet Ratio in the video says otherwise. They definitely have to know each other for a while for Ratio to even know this.

A big reason why Neff even pulled off the murder scheme in the first place was because he wanted to see if his good friend Keyes could figure it out, the Mundane Troubles Trailblaze Continuance showcases Ratio attempting to teach the Herta Space Station researches a lesson to not trust the Genius society as much as they did.

In Keyes’ first scene he’s exposing a worker for writing a policy on his truck that he claimed had burnt down on its own, when he was the one who burnt it down. Ratio gets into an Ace Attorney-style argument with the Trailblazer in Mundane Troubles.

Neff talks repeatedly about how it won’t be sloppy. Nothing weak. And how it’ll be perfect to Phyllis, and how she’s going to do it and he’s going to help her. Doing it right — “straight down the line”. Beautifully ironic, considering what happens in the movie, and even more ironic as Ratio and Aventurine’s scheme went exactly the way they wanted to in the end. Straight down the line.

#honkai star rail #double indemnity #veritas ratio #aventurine #golden ratio #ratiorine #an attempt at analysis by one a-u #relationship analysis #you know what‚ i guess i can tag the other names of this ship #aventio #raturine #you could make a fucking tierlist of these names #um‚ dynamics (yk what i mean) dont really matter here in the analysis just fyi if youre wondering its general enough #also if you're wondering about the compilation thread - its not done. it'll take a while (a long while.)#this post was so long it was initially just a tumblr draft that i then put into google docs. and it ended up being over 2k+ words long #is this a research paper‚ thesis‚ or essay? who knows! this just started as just a short analysis after watching the movie on may 5 #final word count according to docs (excluding alt text): 13013 - 43 pages with formatting #i wish i could have added more images to this‚ 10k words vs 30 images really is not doing me any favours…#plus‚ i hit the character limit for alt text for one of the images.#if you see me mixing up british and american spelling‚ you probably have!#oh yeah. if any of the links happen to break at some point. do tell. i have everything backed up #there also may be multiple links strung together‚ just so you know.#I link videos using the EN and CN voiceovers. Just keep that in mind if the jump between two languages seems sudden.#I had to copy and paste this thing from the original tumblr draft onto a new post because tumblr wouldn't let me edit the old one anymore.#Feels just like when I was finalising my song comic…#(Note: I had to do this three times.)#I started this at May 5 as a way to pass the time before 2.2. You can probably tell how that turned out.#Did you know there is a limit to the amount of links you can add to a single tumblr post? It's 100. I hit that limit as well.#So if you want context for some of these parts... just ask.#I'm gonna stop here before I hit the tag limit (30) as well LMAOO (never mind I just did.)

333 notes · View notes

anadiasmount · 4 months ago

Note

ana babes, hot tub/late night in the pool w jude fic please? i’ll pay u in infinite kisses💋 (btw no pressure ofc!)

by the edge - jude bellingham x reader.

quick sum: above!

wc: 2.1k | masterlist | jude's masterlist

psa : HIIII IMY ILYSMM, i'm sooooooo incredibly late to this, it's not even funny... but it has been in my drafts and i needed to finish this 😔 so here's summer! jude despite it being over... small suggestive content but not too in-depth. this is also insta au + fic combined!!

———— j.b ————

judebellingham added to their stories!

19 hrs ago | 9 mins ago

———— j.b ————

spottedcelebrity

liked by: popculture, thesun, dailymail, vouge, yourbestie, and 345,901 others!

spottedcelebrity: PHEW. we did not see this one coming! it’s looking like he’s finally showing off his lady, soft-launching her on his latest instagram story! stay tuned for more update and live show at 9pm!

username291: OH?? so he was actually being fr??

user09: the way no one saw this coming (im actually dying inside…)

username39: if you look closely that’s actually me!!!! 🤗

user21: girl bye-

username49: soft launching on his story is the bare minimum…

↪️ user11: isn’t that the point tho? who cares if it’s on his story? he just made a highlight dedicated to her 💋

username29: does anyone know who she is??

↪️ user19: no, he keeps her private.

↪️ username77: we don’t know that, maybe she doesn’t want to be in the public eye

↪️ user45: apparently she’s a business student at the university of madrid…

↪️ username86: people think it’s @ynusername but she’s private on everything so no one can clear that up

user74: oh! SHES GORGEOUS ??

———— j.b ————

ynusername added to their stories! 🔒

19 hrs ago | 12 hrs ago

———— j.b ————

“everyone on twitter is going crazy,” recalled jude, stepping out of the doorway. “why?” you laughed quesionably, unlocking your phone to check what he meant. you were rushed to see his fans eagerly wanting to know who you were, as jude had soft launched you on his latest post. they had not expected that one bit, now they we’re piecing to see who you were.

it wasn’t anything new for you, as you had been doing that privately on your own instagram. the media knew he had a girlfriend, and jude respected your wishes to be private since it tended to be crazy hectic. yet the two of you liked to read comments late at night and see how theyre crazy theories came to light.

“he was with his girlfriend at the airport, they both arrived with hats. she was very pretty and nice as well,” you read, feeling admiration at their comment. there was very few encounters you had together but all of them were positive to say the least which you were grateful for. the last thing you wanted was to be plastered in a tabloid of you being rude or mean.

“a fan account pinned a comment earlier today, that you were a medical student and lived in norway? I never pictured it for it to get this crazy,” joked jude, hearing your laugh as you walked over to the mini bar. “do you want a drink? or would you like to share with me?” you asked, rubbing lime around the rim of the glass so you could coat with salt.

“i’ll just take some sips out of yours,” replied jude, coming behind you to wrap his arms securely around your waist, placing kisses over your shoulder. jude watched as a you made the drink, eating fruit slices from the container you had bought in the morning. “i don’t know what it is, but the fruit here is so much better than the one in spain?” you say, jude immediately agreeing with you and going off how here he had the best mango ever.

“careful, it's slippery,” jude gripped your hand and helped you get down the stairs carefully, making sure you wouldn't fall like he had done the first day here. the summer sea breeze was heavenly, reminiscing the last few days of summer with your boyfriend who seemed attached to you. jude’s second season at real madrid would start soon, and you were on your last year of uni. meaning this year would be hectic and stressful.

yet right now all you could focus on was the palm trees leaves swaing, the late night sky, and the buzz feeling from your tropical drink.

the past few days the two of you had spent exploring and having fun, taking tours around places, going ziplining, trying new foods, lots of walks along the shore, making seashell necklace and a bracelet for jude, and ending your nights like this, in the warm pool. you were grateful the place you had chosen to travel was sorta excluded from the world, being a private getaway without the media following around.

“you okay? you seemed distracted,” jude asked swimming towards you where you lifted your hand to remove the water drops from his face. his sunkissed face from the past few days. you had to force him to wear sunscreen, listening to jude nag and complain he would be fine. you knew this heat, humidity, and sun wasn't like the one in spain, easily burning in the first few seconds stepping outside.

“i don’t want to leave, like ever,” you frowned and pouted your lip, jude chuckling as he picked you, wrapping your legs around his waist as his hands smoothed your bareback. “i don’t picture you as a thalassophile, with your little beach bag and sun hat,” jude joked earning a confused look from you. “a what?” you asked with narrowed eyes.

“a thalassophile.”

“what even is that?” you giggled, your hand scratching the nape of his neck, as jude rested against the pool walls. “a thalassophile? it's someone who loves the ocean. for someone who claims they are the smarter one in the relationship, this is proving otherwise…” jude narrowed his eyes, resting his forehead against yours, seeing the warning look you threw at him. “as the smarter person in the relationship, i’m shocked you even know that word!” you gasp sarcastically.

“hey! leave me alone…” jude tickled you making you swarm around and swim away from him, going to the edge of the pool where he followed. “what would you do? set up a small shop and sell souvenirs?” he teased, seeing how you looked away nonchalantly. “uhm yes? but mine wouldn’t be overpriced or aesthetic shops, i would bring the culture and actual diversity. give a tiny background of my items and what not…” you shrug with a shy smile, seeing jude’s eyes never leaving yours, watching how your lashes fluttered and iris dilate.

“why are you looking at me like that? it makes me nervous, baby…” you admit with cheeks flushed, shaking your head. jude laughs and looks away, making you let out a breath you didn’t know you were holding. your pulse and heart racing with one simple glance from him. “does it? i didn’t know that,” he said carelessly, bringing you back into his embrace, tucking and brushing away your hair that covered your shy face.

“stop lying…” you rolled your eyes playfully, feeling jude’s warm hands as they ran your sides and thighs. “if i'm a liar, why aren't my pants on fire?” he joked terribley, his brum accent appearing more than ever, which made the two of you burst out laughing. “you and your jokes i swear… you think you're the funniest person ever,” you tease, hearing jude gasp. “maybe because i am?” defended jude.

you swam back to your drink, having to pull off from your clingy boyfriend, who complained the minute you were away. you finished it, after offering jude some, hearing the ice clink in the glass, only having the strawberry left, which you took a bite of. jude watched intensely, seeing your lips around the red fruit and leave a trail behind.

he swallowed deeply as you stepped near him, feeling your arm wrap around his shoulders, coming between his legs, your tongue licking off the extra strawberry off your top lip as you offered him some. his eyes looked up into yours, tasting the bitter yet sweet taste from the fruit as he took a bite. he stood up, towering over you as you placed the stem in the cup, your back resting on the pool.

“you're so beautiful y/n… absolutely stunning,” he whispered, seeing upon how his words had an effect on you. you traced your hands around his bare muscles, veins decorating along his arms, as his fingers tilted your chin to him, jude crashing his lips on yours. he deepens the kiss, managing to sneek his tongue into your mouth, groaning and pulling closer to him, his hand tugging you locks of hair from the back, making you let out a tiny moan.

“tastes so much better from your lips,” he whispered, yet he didn’t stop, and you didn’t want him to. this was so different, so intimate, driven by lust. jude knew all your spots, and you learned his. he knew how to bring you to the edge, the movement, the words. so it wasn't a surprise when he pulled away, pressing your hips down onto him, kissing down your jaw to your sweetspot on your neck, sucking softly making you shiver and throw your head back. “mhm jude… what if someone sees?” you say worriedly.

“they won't… we’re alone here, it's just you and me.”

you leaned down and captured his lips again, smacking his shoulder gently. “not so fast,” you giggle, feeling as he fondled with the bowtie on your bikini. jude gave you a playful smile, knowing his intentions wouldn't be so innocent. “what i wasn’t doing anything,” jude shrugged. “right cause you never do, and especially on this trip…” you eye him down.

“i just want to love and appreciate my girl.”

“you have… i think this may be our favorite trip. it's something about this place i don’t know,” you blabber off, jude listening to every word, already making a future visits for the next years to come. maybe one day bring your kids to this paradise even himself grown to love. seeing you in a new environment, with your summer glow of happiness, he could get used to it. he would drop anything, even football, just to see you this radiant. it didn’t matter if it was in the sunlight or moonlight.

“you think our kids would love this place?” jude said suddenly making your crinkle your brows. “kids? you want to have kids with me?” you say unsurely, earning a confused glance from jude who tensed up. “yes… i wouldn’t picture anyone else,” jude replied, seeing how your eyes dazed from bewilderment to jovial. “you better not, you know how i am,” you give him a look.

“trust me i know,” jude said, thinking back to the one time a girl wouldn’t get a hint he was with you, doing the upmost right in your face, flirting, touching him, following him. it didn’t help you were deep in with tequila shots, embarrassing the girl by calling her out in public. but she took the hint.

“i’m serious though y/n… i want everything and anything for you and us,” confessed jude, pecking your lips where you turned away shyly once again. “you don’t know the amount of times i think about our future. what were doing 5 years from now, our home, kids, hell pets even! i know you seriously want a cat, i’m willing to do whatever it is to see you smiling always…” he continued, your gazed bored into each other, as in a way of sealing this moment for eternity.

“when you won the champions league that night, do you remember what i said to you?” you ask, seeing jude think about it, and by seeing his face you knew he was bound to say something silly. “i was really drunk that night, so i don’t recal much,” jude taunted, earning another gentle slap on his shoulder from you.

“be serious!” you threatened with a huge grin.

“if you’re recalling when you promised a lifetime with me, confessed your love, and promised me that you’d stick with me forever? that you knew it was a complete different world when i was in it? that you wanted to continue making memories with me, no matter the sacrifices?” jude recalled, watching how your eyes became teary. “yes. i remember it all.”

you sniffed while also giggling, kissing jude deeply and messily once again. you notice how jude’s breathing accelerated, tugging you closer to him and keeping you steady, making you sigh in content. “i’ll never get tired of kissing you,” you admit, kissing his nose and a tiny mole he had at the end of his brow, as jude then twirled you both around, hearing the squeal of excitement escape your lips.

“so about our babies-”

“babies?”

“yes babies. i want more than 2 kids,” jude said with a huge smile, seeing how you gave him a look. “we’ll have one first and then see,” you state, seeing jude shake his head. “nuh uh, i’m not having that, especially when i heard you say to your best friends you would give me 6 kids when we met that night,” jude said smirking when he knew he had caught you.

“YOU DID NOT HEAR THAT? OH MY GOD, YOU ACTUALLY HEARD THAT?”

the rest of the night, you and jude counted the stars, he even made another drink where he repeatedly insisted he wanted to repeat the kiss you once had. you even played those silly pool games where you threw a item in the pool and one of you had to find and retrieve it, a game of 2 truths and 1 lie, and recalling your earliest memories you could think of.

towards the end of the night you sat on the edge of the pool, watching jude do some laps before he swam up to you. you clenched your legs together, when feeling his lips trail kisses up your thighs, forcing you to open them so he could continue on the inside of them. “what are you doing?” you shakily say, seeing jude look up to you as he placed a final kiss on a tiny scar you had.

“nothing…” jude murmured, pulling you closer to him, where you now realized how this night would end. but you didn’t complain, because you wanted him that desperately too. showing him just how much you needed and wanted him. jude didn’t fight it either, having a taste by the pool side, to then carrying you into you room where he continued to show you, prove to you how special you were.

“gonna take care of you, you deserve it angelito mio.”

———— j.b ————

judebellingham

liked by: ynusername, brahim, yourbestie, camavinga, vinijr, sophiaamelia, fedevalverde, vogue, spottedcelebrity, and 4,888,769 others!

judeballingham: living life it's fullest along with you mi angelito divino 🤍

comments:

ynusername: EEKKK!! ILYSM 😣😣😣😣

ynusername: still thinking how sunburnt you got...

vinijr: no invite?

↪️ judebellingham: do you have a gf?

jobebellingham: literally why

↪️ judebellingham: why not?

spottedcelebrity: HARD LAUNCH? IS EVERYONE BREATHING OKAY?

↪️ ynusername: no.

trentalexanderarnold: very demure, very cutesy!

username19: hard launch? oh wow!

user38: this is actually so crazy im??????

vogue: HEY JUDE!

———— j.b ————

ynusername 🔒-> 🔓

liked by: judebellingham, yourbestie, jobebellingham, jennaortega, monetmcmicheal, spottedcelebrity, rubendias, trentalexanderarnold, adidas, glossier, and 34,897 others!

ynusername: i LOVE my man!! ily ily ily!! happy gal in happy place with my man!! EEEKKKKK!!!!!!!!!! 💞💕♥️💘💖💓💗💝

comments:

judebellingham: i can't tell if this is sarcasm or your being fr...

↪️ jobebellingham: she hates you. she CAN'T stand you! blink twice if you need help y/n

ynusername: blinks three times **

judebellingham: strawberry kissed.

judebellingham: you're so sexy, i'm so in love with you.

judebellingham: another pool night?

↪️ ynusername: yess!! 🤭🤭

rubendias: lol.

↪️ user55: tea...

↪️ username76: OH? @spottedcelebrity take a look at this?

↪️ spottedcelebrity: yikes... ruben in the comments of THE y/n??

yourbestie: imy!! eek you're glowing!! 🥹🥹

username10: omg!! she has been soft-launching him for a YEAR?

user30: so we were right...

username85: ur a smart and gorgeous queen!

user99: stop i love them so much.

#judey thoughts 5️⃣#jude bellingham x reader #jude bellingham blurb #jude bellingham imagine

481 notes · View notes

mingi-s-dimples · 4 months ago

Text

Crave me - yunho

pairing: bf!yunho x gf fem!reader

rating: 18+, bdsm

genre: romance, bdsm, filthy smut (mdni ty)

summary: The bratty attitude you had with him didn't last long.. as he leaves his patience at the table and destroys you.

WC: 3.5k

warnings: rough/strict dom!yunho, bratty sub fem!reader, bdsm, choking, neck kink, sucking, blowjob, making out, tying up, pet names (darling, babe, love, pretty boy, sweetie, sweetheart), degradation kink (slut, cumslut, whore), praise kink, slapping/spanking, both vaginal and anal, use of bdsm attire (cuffs, blindfold, rope), use of toys (vibrator), sense deprivation (blindfold), little bit of hand kink, punishing, edging, creampie, ruined orgasms, multiple rounds, deals (but Yunho feels cocky and he said fuck the deal), cum cum cum a lot of cummm, squirting, mentions of safe word but never used (reader is a brat), cum eating, big dick!yunho, overstim, backshots, unprotected (REMEMBER TO WRAP UP IRL !), completely consesual !, for sure forgot something.

Author's Note: SO ! When I first started writing this fic, several day ago, I didn't intend to make it this.. filthy. But.. my lovely bestie rated the roughness in the other 3 fics I have posted an average of 8.sth/10 and I took that as a CHALLENGE. Hope you like it, Lis, love you sweetie. Another small note: WHY AREN'T THERE MORE BDSM FICS OUT THERE HELLO? I'M A SUCKER FOR THEM !

Update, Lis: okay, even though i saw some paragraphs before this was published, i was still taken off guard by this. i’m taking back my words, roughness level 10/10, WHEN I TELL YOU I HAD TO TAKE A BREAK AND BREATHE. seriously i love this fic sm and bia you are so talented, you never fail to amaze me❤️❤️ please keep going with your work, i love youu<3 ( i’m still waiting for a demon joong fic 👹👹👹 ) - my answer: the demon joong fic is alr in my drafts, halfway done.

Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction & does not represent in any way the reality of the member.

The grand dining hall was a symphony of opulence and elegance, its high vaulted ceilings adorned with intricate plasterwork and crystal chandeliers casting a warm, golden glow over the scene. Rich tapestries hung from the walls, their deep hues of burgundy and gold complementing the polished mahogany of the round, small dining tables. As the guests settled into their seats, the gentle strains of a string quartet drifted through the air, mingling with the soft clinking of fine glasses and the murmur of animated conversation.

At one end of the table you were sitting at, the host, Park Seonghwa raised his glass in a toast, his voice resonant and filled with the gravitas of tradition. Across from him, Hongjoong's laughter rang out, light and melodious, adding a delicate counterpoint to the music. The aroma of roasted meats and rich sauces wafted from the platters being served, each dish a masterpiece of culinary art. Conversations flowed like the wine, moving from the latest societal gossip to philosophical musings, as the guests, dressed in their finest evening attire, engaged in a dance of words and wit.

In this setting, every detail was meticulously curated to create an atmosphere of refined luxury and cultural sophistication. Yet, beneath the surface of this carefully constructed elegance, the undercurrents of intrigue and hidden agendas were beginning to stir, promising that the evening's conviviality was only the prelude to a much deeper story.

You, a renowed and well known supermodel, were sitting right next to your husband, Jeong Yunho. He was the CEO of the agency you were modelling at.

The thing is... besides the lovey-dovey side you and Yunho always showed to the other guests and your friends, for example Seonghwa, Hongjoong and the others, the two of you had... another side to your relationship.

Your intimate relationship dynamic was quite.. the opposite of what you were showing. From light forehead kisses, hand holding and warm hugs and kisses... to cuffs, blindfolds and degradation. No one knew the real you when in private, and it made the whole thing way better.

*several minutes later*

"Ooookay, should I ask the chef to bring us some desserts? I think the dinner went really well!" Hongjoong said smiling, watching each of his guests contently. He then hovered his eyes over the whole venue, you could see the happiness flooding over him. It was the ending dinner for a really important business plan that came to a final success.

While the others were happily celebrating with the host, you and Yunho were giving each other some stares. One of the things you loved the most to do was to annoy your man. Why? Cause you knew he'd destroy you the same night. You were never allowed to do things on your own, without his permission. Things such as touching him in public, deny his own touching, dress how you'd like without his approval, because he was really jealous of needy and hungry eyes that always wanted you. Everyone had envy for him, because you were the most beautiful model in your country, the agency itself was the best one, too. But tonight.. you decided to do.. everything that annoyed him and drove him insane. You first started with a.. really nice outfit, you'd say. It was halfway see-through, high heels and silver, bold jewelry completing the look. You were wearing two pieces, a short but flowy black skirt and a white, almost translucent shirt, an elegant one. Your hair was straightened, flowing beautifully on your bare back, as the shirt you were wearing only covered your chest. A silver chain was connecting two pieces of fabric on your back, making you flinch with every slight touch, because of the sheer coldness.

"Darling.. did I ever approve of... this outfit?" Yunho whispered, one of his hands going on your thigh. You tried to deny his touch, moving his hand away, but he only dug his nails deeper into your leg. You flinched, looking at him in the eyes, with an almost innocent look.

"Oh babe... don't you like it? Damn.. I thought it looked really nice" you said sheepishly, smiling at him.

"I didn't say I don't like it but... didn't we agree that these types of visible outfits are... only for me to see, hm?" he whispered and approached your neck with his lips, slightly biting it.

"Babe.. there's people around us. What would they think of you, seeing you kissing me like that?" you said, trying to get a reaction out of him but to your surprise, he remained calm and content, biting you harder.

"Do I look like I give a fuck? You did it to yourself, love. This is the first strike of tonight.. be careful for the rest of the time. I don't feel like destroying your beautiful body when we get back in the room." Yunho said, going in for a soft kiss on your lips.

"We'll see about that, babe." you said and got up from your seat, searching with your eyes the champagne bar.

Someone came behind your back. Of course, it was Yunho, all touchy on your bare waist, as the shirt you were wearing was pretty.. short.

"Babe.. I almost forgot" he mumbled.

"What did I tell you about denying my hand, hm?" his hands hovering your back, one of them on your ass and one on the nape of your neck, slightly squeezing it. "Hm? what did I tell you, mind sharing me your reason?"

"You told me that I should... never move your hand away from myself.." you said turning around to face him. "But... what's entirely wrong with it.. pretty boy? Don't you like it when I tease you..?" you said and gave him a kiss, your hands traveling from his neck to his collarbones, then from his chest to his belt, tugging at it for a second.

"This is.." he whispered. "Strike two.. my love." One more and we're out of here.. remember the rule?" he squeezed your ass, looking right into your eyes, seeing how eager you were to fuck him right there.

Several minutes pass and you were back to your table, sitting next to each other. He effortlessly pulled your seat closer to his, making you gulp at his power and speed. Looking him in the eyes you started being all touchy with him. Started from his hands, feeling up his slender and long fingers, then to his biceps. You stayed like that for a long minute, with your head resting on his shoulder, then one of your hands went straight for his crotch, no warning.

"Yunho, everything good? Why did you flinch, is it too cold here?" Seonghwa asked, confused.

"Ah yes, everything is fine, don't worry about it" he said smiling, squeezing your thigh, his hand going to your pussy, rubbing circles through your panties from under your skirt.

"Babe... that's strike three, if you ask me." he said and patted you on your thigh, to make you look at him. He then looked around for the exit doors and excused himself, taking your hand into his.

"Joong, we'll be back, I need to take care of something at the agency" Yunho said and then dragged you out.

And as the two of you got out the doors, there was a long empty hall, no one was there. He slammed you to the wall, one of his hands on your throat and one lifting you up. He was going towards the elevator.

"Nh- babe, where are we going? you said through the kisses.

"Just upstairs, I reserved a room for us right here. I didn't think we'd need it but... you wanted to be a little slut so it serves us good. Aren't you my little whore, hm? All down for me, I saw you eye fucking me when you were getting champagne. You wanted me to fuck you dumb tonight, mm? he said while going in the elevator.

"What did you want me to do babe, hm? Did you miss my slaps and my cuffs? You little slut, you'll see what will happen if you're being a brat with me again" and right as he said this, he held you close as he opened the door with the keycard. He closed it and he dropped you on your bed.

Some meters from the king sized bed there was a small bag, and you knew so well what there was... cuffs, blindfolds, ropes.. everything you could think of as a sub. And yes.. the relationship between you and your husband, in private, was a dom/sub one. You found out that you were both into bdsm a while ago, when Yunho didn't resist anymore and tried something new on you. You loved it and... it became a really often practice.

"Love, spread out, now." he said as he went back to get something from the bag.

You were still dressed and he was too. But you could feel yourself leaking right on the bed. You knew you left a wet spot on the dark sheets, something that turned your man on even more.

"Told you to spread the fuck out, you brat. When did you get so naughty, hm? Want me to put you in your place? he said as he spread your legs out, tying them to the bed frame. You still had your clothes on, but the skirt was lifted up and the blouse was all messed up. He ripped of your panties and threw them on the floor.

You tried to say something but didn't have time to react. He went back to the bag and took out some cuffs, then got on the bed, his crotch, still dressed, rubbing on your folds. You could feel his bulge getting bigger, his pants getting thighter as he went further to tie your hands to the headboard.

"For all of what you did tonight.. babe, you'll get punished, you know that, right? he said as he hovered his hand over your throat and collarbones. "Stay still, I'll tie a sheer blindfold to your eyes. I want you to still be able to distinguish how I destroy your little and pretty pussy."

"Yuyu.. please. Fuck me." you pleaded, trying to look him in the eyes. Whenever he tied a blindfold on your eyes.. it turned you on so bad. You couldn't properly see what was happening nor what he was doing, preparing what to do to you.. but it was thrilling.

"Hmm... what should I start with.. pretty slut, mm? Should I just edge you until you can't take it anymore and cum out of overstimulation and exhaustion, should I make you cry and not let you cum the whole night? Should I.... fuck you and deny your orgasm how you denied my hand? Tell me, sweetheart. I need words, not muffled sounds." he confidently said, giving you a smirk and his right hand going right to your blouse, easily unbuttoning it and throwing it away on the floor.

He hastly gets rid of your bra, his groping entirely unhelpful. Large hands, slender fingers roaming your body, sliding over your nipples, pressing and nibbling at them, cupping your breasts and hoisting your legs up and around his waist. Him, still clothed, you.. only with your skirt on, if that's even important.

"Fuck, Yuyu —" you gasp when he sucks a dark bruise into the skin of your neck, while one of his hands went to his shirt. He slowly unbuttoned it, then went for his pants. He undid them halfway and pushed towards you, getting a soft moan out of your slowly rising chest, heavy breathing from all the manhandling he did on you. He was taking his time. He absolutely loved seeing you begging for his cock, squirming and moving against his crotch in wish of friction. But.. Yunho left all his patience at the door.

"Babe, how did you get me this mad, hm? Did you even think about the consequences, you little slut? If that's what you wanted.. I'll destroy you, sweetheart."

Two of his fingers trace your hole before sinking into you, curling to find the right spot. All you can do is arch your back, your moans and cries soon muffled by one of his hands, as he chokes you.

"Is this what you wanted? rile me up so I'd fuck you hard tonight? all you needed to do is ask, sweetie." Yunho said, curling his fingers right into your sweet spot, receiving some loud moans from you.

You could ask and he'd give you the moon if he could. But he was a completely different person in bed. There's something about him taking you like this, almost feral, that makes your toes curl.. could it be his fingers and how he curls them in you so good that he makes you shiver and cum, maybe squirt all over the place? would it be... his cock and how deep you feel it in you, scared that he might destroy your insides?

He fucks his fingers into you sloppily, scissoring you open with little to no care if it hurts or not. It was clear that he only had one goal in sight, and that being stretching you out just enough to be able to take his cock.

It only takes a few more strokes before he's satisfied, the blunt head of his dick prodding at your entrance, getting loud whimpers from you.

"Use the safe word if it's too much" he said and started pounding into you, making your hands rocket to the headboard, holding on for dear life. It's the only warning he gives you but.. it's enough to get an understanding on how pissed he was. He was holding so thight onto your thighs, them around his waist, that you knew you'd have bruises the next day.

"So fucking tiny" he grunts as he watches you struggle to adjust to his size "Such a whore for my cock, mhm? You take it so well... even if it destroys you. Be my cumslut, won't you? I'll edge you until you can't take it anymore."

"Y-yunho !" you shouted as he used a vibrator on your clit, arching your back at the sensation. The puffed bud he was stimulating made you feel like you'd already come, but something else happend. Your walls clenched on his cock, receiving a low grunt and as he slowed down his thrusts, he watched you contently at how you squirted all over him and the bed.

"Oh wow, already? Lucky this is the only thing I'm letting you do, you little slut" he said as he thrusted even deeper, harder, sloppier into you.

"Babe, n-no don't do th-that I might c-cum" you said as he was giving you another round of circles on your clit, feeling how overstimulated you were.

"Nope, I won't let you" he said as he stopped, pulling out of you, your hole clenching on nothing.

He started rubbing his length lazily, looking at you squirming right in front of him. You wanted to be fucked dumb, until you couldn't walk anymore. But that wasn't his plan for tonight.

"Let's make a deal. If you make me cum only with your mouth, no hands and no sucking. Just touching, licking and nibbling, I'll let you cum. Otherwise, you'll get slapped and fucked... not in your little aching pussy, but deep down in your cute and red ass, until you cry. What do you say, babe, a pretty good deal, I'd say?" he said as he uncuffed your hands, lifting you on your knees.

The thing is... you weren't quite.. on your knees. You were spread out, your aching hole rubbing on the wet and sloppy linen underneath you. You started humping it slowly, not knowing if you were allowed to, but he somehow didn't mind it. He knew you weren't able to cum only from humping on a cloth so he let you do your thing.

"Now.. be my little cumslut and get on licking." he said guiding your head to his dick, throbbing on your lips. You had your hands cuffed at your back, not being able to move them. You started kissing, nibling at the tip, getting some nice groans out of him. Then you started licking the slit, putting pressure with your tongue and licking his length all down to the base of it. The circles you always make on the tip get him from being silent to being louder, as the sloppy sounds of your tongue turns him on more.

"Yes, just like that, sweetie. A liiiittle bit more and you're getting me closer."

You started nibbling, almost like sucking on his tip.

"Yuh, mhm. Go on, make me cum, you little whore" he said as his breath started getting faster, heavier, your licks getting sloppier as he tried so hard not to cum but... you did the deal. He came all over your face, as you were not allowed to suck it.

"Good girl, such a good girl you are" he said as he wiped off his load from your face with one hand and with the other one opening your mouth, his thumb on your bottom lip. He let his cum drip onto your tongue, signaling you by raising his brows to swallow. You did as he wanted, soon sucking his fingers to get every drop of his load.

"Y'know babe.. I kinda changed my mind in between your little nibbles." he said as he turned you over, on your belly, one of his hands on the back of your throat. "You're gonna take me so well, I will make sure of it." he said as two of his fingers went in your other hole, no warnings. You moaned at the feeling of his fingers curling up inside you. The same as before, his goal was to make your hole be able to engulf his length, but this time his goal was to bottom down entirely.

"Thought you could just leave me like that?" he wraps a hand around your waist, the other one on your neck, "leave me high and dry without any repercussions? You're lucky I'll keep my promise and let you cum so... cum, you little slut." as he started pounding heavily and deeply into you.

The hand he had on your waist goes to your pussy, curling them inside you and rubbing your clit.

You shake your head at his words, the coil in your tummy tightening with every word he hisses into your ear, wetness dripping down his balls and coating them as he pounds into your ass.

Yunho could feel you clenching around his cock, knows you're close by the familiar rhythm and your muffled whines rising in pitch. He removes his thight hold on your neck, letting you turn your head around, gasping for air.

"'m so close, fuck, yunho, gonna cum —"

Your entire body tenses then slumps down against the mattress, only held up by his strong arm around your waist. Yunho fucks you through your orgasm, through the oversensitivity and the chants of your little whimpers and words.

"too much, 's too much, please, s-stop" but you never use your safe word. You whine and you cry until your limp body is pushed over the edge again, eyes rolling back while you cream his cock, the 2nd time in a short time.

"c-can't," you whimper weakly, "please cum, please — Yunho, please-"

You're begging him so sweetly, voice cracking and body at his mercy. Yunho's hips stutter and his load spills deep inside of you. Your knees buckle under his waist and you whine when the two of you stumble back, his arms wrapped around your chest, all touchy on your breasts.

"You're gonna take my cum all, you little whore. Remember what I said, being my cumslut? Now, take it" he said as he continued pounding into you, getting you over the edge. He didn't lie when he said he'd destroy you, your knees trembling as he closed the gap between the two of you. He then pulled out, pumping his length and his other hand going to your clit over your thigh, sending you shivers down your spine as you squirt once again for the night, now your body being only handled by the hand he used on you.

"What a good whore I have, mm" he mumbled as he came on your back, slowing down his pumps as he slowly puts you down on the mattress.

"See babe? What happens if you're a fucking brat?" he said as he undid the blindfold, looking at your teary eyes.

"What, by the look you have, you want more, you little slut? Is that right?" he said as he slapped your ass.

"Don't worry, I wasn't even close to being done tonight, turn around, I want you to see me fucking you this time."

#ateez fanfic #ateez x reader #smut fic #ateez fic #ateez #ateez smut #ateez x y/n #fanfic #smut #yunho x y/n #yunho x reader #ateez yunho #yunho smut #bd/sm kink #bd/sm brat #dom/sub #cumslvt #whor3 #so hot 🔥🔥🔥

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captainfantasticalright · 9 months ago

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Another Sir Terry Pratchett interview on the details of writing Good Omens with Neil Gaiman. (More about this process x).

Question about how he goes about collaborating with someone else .

Terry: “You make them do what you want”.

Gary Cornell came up with something very apposite talking about working together, he says : It’s not that (each) of you does 50% of the work, each of you does 90% of the work.

Um. The way we did it then, and I can’t really speak as an expert because it's the only time I’ve ever done it and other people do it in different ways, it wasn’t a case of, the way the Americans tend to do it, um, is one person writes a draft and the other person goes in and noodles with that draft. We did the whole thing from the ground up; each was doing bits. The ad hoc way we had of working, it’s simple: I’ve got a track record writing novels, Neil hadn’t. So I became like the editor, the taskmaster. Because the other thing is the practical problem about two people 120 miles apart doing something, is that, um, it would be different now, but in those days we had no reliable means of electronic communication. We could connect computers together with modems and then spend the whole evening at cross purpose and ringing each other up and saying “I’m getting lots of little faces and shit like that all over..”

Three quarters of an hour and about eight phone calls, you actually managed to transmit about 2000 words you could have actually phoned and sneezed in a morse code.

[w]hen we were doing the first draft of the film script, we were both members of CompuServe so crappy our BT rural lines that the quick efficient way was for me to go into CompuServe and leave the work I’d done in Neil’s mailbox on the computer in Ohio or someplace and later that evening he would dial CompuServe in America and download it from Ohio or wherever it was.

So in order to get the script 120 miles, electronically it was doing about 10000. This is from the global village.

What we would do is I would hold the master copy and sometimes work would have to stop for 24 hours because stuff was in the post, because the nightmare, the absolute nightmare which I knew would happen if we let it, was that somehow we’d end up with two master copies in existence with little, minute changes, and we’d never be able to spot which was which.

So the last thing we wanted was two master copies, and we worked on the phone who did what. I did a bit more than Neil, of that anyway. But, it also felt to me to be an awful lot of the glue that no one wanted to do because it was easy to do set piece scenes and written on a kind of, on the kind of plot somewhere you get A and B to F and X and Y across to C T. And that really is like 3000 words where you have to move people around and then,you know, shove extra bits in; so I ended up probably doing near 75% of the book.

I would probably say because it’s, because had we’ve done it any other way it would’ve been like three months longer to do.

Also part of the process from another interview with Terry Pratchett:

Q: Let's talk a bit about the book you collaborated with Neil Gaiman on: Good Omens. That was before email, so how did it work on a practical basis? What was the most challenging aspect of writing with someone else?

I'm sure what I have to say will echo what Neil has said. When two people work on a book, it isn't a case where each one does 50% of the work. Each one does 100% of the work. There are some bits in Good Omens which I know are mine. There are some bits in Good Omens which I know are Neil's. There are some bits which were Neil's idea which I wrote, and there are some bits which were my idea which Neil wrote. Some bits we no longer know exactly whose ideas they were, or who wrote them. By the time we'd gone through all the drafts, it had been written by some sort of composite entity. We wrote it in the 14th century. We each had one phone line and a 1200 baud modem. We'd work it out: "OK, you send, I'll receive." Sometimes it would take 20 minutes to half an hour before we could send the stuff. It would have been cheaper and easier to have rung each other up and sneezed out the text in Morse Code. I was the Keeper of the Disks. I insisted that there should only be one official version in existence at any time. The moment it split into two, we would be in dead trouble. But Neil would sometimes send me a disk with 2000 words, saying " This is the scene with so and so -- insert it here." It more or less worked. It took us about six weeks to do the first draft. I think it worked because, at the time, we were each making a name for ourselves in our respective fields. It's not that we didn't take it seriously. But we were relaxed. We thought we would earn some holiday money by doing it. The nice thing about collaborating is that there is one other person in the world who is thinking about the exact same thing that you are thinking about. We both have a similar reading background, I suppose. It was quite rare when one of us came up with something that the other guy didn't know about. So we could bounce ideas off one another quite easily.

#good omens #crowley #terry pratchett #neil gaiman #aziraphale #ineffable husbands #good omens fun facts #good omens interviews #sir terry pratchett #this place is lacking on terry interviews

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uh-oh-its-bird · 7 months ago

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Offshoot of my "team Ro time travels to the founders era" post because @prinzgnomeovonchaos infected me with brain rot in the notes

So buckle in baby it's time for

Sakumo and babyKashi time traveling to the warring states ✨️

So first thing to get out of the way; Modern Hatake's and warring states era Hatake's do not hold up to the same standards.

The Hatake's during the states were a very small clan with a very big reputation. Hailing from Iron, they were an almost famous wild clan even all the way in fire country. Distantly related to the Inuzuka's but leaning more towards wolves than dogs.

They had a proper kekkei genkai and everything, unnaturally fast and strong, often born with some form of enhanced senses— be it smell, sight, taste, or even touch. Their white chakra fed into it, and they'd feed their chakra with diets of raw meat and the occasional light cannibalism during some special clan celebrations and rituals.

Unfortunatley Sakumo knows very little about the above because he was very young when his clan was pretty much all wiped out. He was raised by the only other survivor, his grandmother, who was pretty young herself when the clan got wiped, and unfortunatley was never all too concious of many of the rituals and traditions of her clan until it was too late.

Sakumo grew up to village standards and was mostly declawed because of it, and Kakashi is only doubly so. And with that dulling of all the different traditions and specific diets also came the slow fading of their bloodline limit, which was already pretty subtle if you didn't know what you're looking for.

Anyways moving on, and if you want more details for my headcanons ab warring states Hatake's vs modern standard Hatake's look at my other time travel post bc I talk ab it more there.

So Kakashi is like 6 (holy shit he's a BABY baby)

Google keeps giving me conflicting numbers for Sakumo's age at his death so we're just gonna shrug and say he's in his early 30's.

Then for the founders;

Madara (23)

Hashirama (23)

Izuna (19)

Tobirama (18)

Sakumo is staring at these guys going through it bc they are BABIES to him. And like look, he's used to working with or even occasionally under people much younger than him, but like. Oh man that's the shodai hokage. And he's like a toddler.

(He's a 23 year old man but Sakumo is kind of having a crisis so he can't register that)

So like. All the founders have major daddy issues, right? Like we can all agree that's plausible? I'm so sorry I just think it'd be *really fucking funny* if they look at Sakumo and just kinda. Yeah.

You know what I mean.

Anyways;

No idea how they got there!! This is set maybe a week before Sakumo offed himself but now he can't kill himself bc that'd mean abandoning Kakashi to the fucking warring states.

Kakashi fits the warring states standards alarmingly well actually. Honestly I think even for that time period he's still scarily young to be on the field. People are giving Sakumo looks like 'it's so hard what we've been forced to do to our children, the battles we've pushed them into, the things they've seen and done all too young'

Sakumo is going *hrrg.* and having a good long look in the mirror actually. Proper crisis, lots of guilt, Kakashi should not be out in the field this young and at least before he was mostly getting baby missions but now they're stranded in time and keep running head first into trouble.

I want Izuna and Kakashi to fight and even though Kakashi absoloutley should NOT win that battle I want him to win just so that Madara and Tobirama can make fun of him for losing to an actual child

Izuna is mortified he wants that brat DEAD

Uhh I have some more but I'm at work and actually hit post too early on this post so I had to come back to rush add all these edits bc I meant for it to stay a draft I could keep adding too later. So I'll just come add more later fr

#birds fic talk #time travel #fuck I do nothing but time travel do I #whatever i can accept that as my “thing”#naruto #fanfiction #hatake lore #dogteeth kakashi #kakashi hatake #hatake sakumo #madara uchiha #uchiha #uzhiha izuna #tobirama senju #hashirama senju #warring states period #time travel au #hatake

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mysewingadventures · 3 months ago

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Making the ✨Lioncourt Gown✨ (Part 1/4)

Shoot, it's been like two years since I last posted, apologies! I’ve been incredibly busy with uni and life in general, taking care of my mental health, it’s just been a very stressful time lately. I haven't really worked on anything worthy of posting in the meantime, only minor things and one dress I rushed and it didn't turn out well anyway. But, since Halloween is coming up and I don’t feel like wearing the same thing for the third time in a row, I thought it was the perfect excuse to try and make something new and the other day at 2am I fell down a rabbit hole and came up with an idea I’m completely obsessed with.

So recently, (in case you couldn't tell by the title haha) I’ve been really into Interview with the Vampire (the TV show), and there’s this one costume that’s so iconic it immediately caught my attention: This Lestat outfit.

I feel like since this blog isn't fandom related I need to explain myself to those of you who are just semi-familiar with IWTV. Maybe you know Lestat as essentially the villain of the story and are wondering why on earth I'd want to make an outfit inspired by him. The answer is quite simple and not actually deep at all: I just thought it'd be a fun project. I'm very well aware of his personality and would not want to be in the same room as him in real life haha. But he's such an interesting character to watch on screen (they all are, in my opinion). Anyways-

This outfit is from a scene that takes place in the 1790s and now, I’m unfortunately not too versed in men’s fashion so I can’t quite comment on its historical accuracy (and also it’s worn in the context of a theater performance so it’s bound to be more flashy than what people would have worn on the streets), but the way the lapel is shaped just screams redingote to me, and since I've always wanted to make a redingote I'm going to make a redingote version of the costume!

For reference, here's what a c. 1790 redingote looks like:

This one has a normal button closure but redingotes were also often double-breasted (which is what I'm going for), taking inspiration from men's fashion. These were often worn to ride in - hence the name, redingote - riding coat.

Maybe this is the point where I should mention that I'm not going for perfect historical accuracy for this project. It really is just a fun project to try to approximate something as seen on a show to an actual historical piece of clothing.

Here’s a super quick sketch I drew to check if the colors looked good together, and I have to say, I’m sold 1000%.

I am so excited to wear this when it’s done, but also a bit anxious because for starters, I’ve never made a redingote before, and the dresses that I have made all have issues with the sleeves because apparently, I can’t sew sleeves correctly. So this time, I really want to make sure it all fits properly before I sew it and take my time with it to make sure it ends up being something that I love as much as I love the idea of it.

This time, I tried something a little different with my mockup - usually, I’ll draft a pattern on paper, then cut out my mockup and sew it, but this time I decided to make the mockup by draping the fabric directly on the mannequin that I dressed in my stays and a bumroll, making sure I had the correct measurments, and it was a complete gamechanger. It fit right away with minimal adjustments, and I was also immediately able to check how the fabric falls, if it needed to be on the bias or not, etc. I ended up doing everything on straight grain which is technically not 100% correct as the front piece needs to be on a slight bias but it seems to work for this piece so let’s hope the fabric doesn’t wrinkle! I’ll also be adding boning so I’m hoping that’ll additionally keep it all straight and even in the front.

Once the mockup was completed, I went on the search for the right fabrics and got these (the skirt fabric, the buttons and the tape I ordered online and they've yet to arrive!):

The black base fabric and the blue one are cotton, as will be the skirt. The details are satin! I spent a long time at the fabric store trying to think of the best way to do this and it does look like the details on Lestat's outfit are maybe velvet, but I was afraid it would look a little too costume-y and cheap, so I ended up going with satin in the end.

I pinned the fabric mock-up onto the lining fabric (just a white Ikea bedsheet), added 1,5cm seam allowances where needed cut out the lining first, then placed the lining onto the black base fabric and cut that out as well.

I needed to lay the pieces down this way because I bought 2,5 meters, and I'll need 2m for the outer skirt alone so there's not a lot of space left, as I'll also have to cut out the sleeves from that fabric. I then sewed everything together.

And then I noticed I'd made a mistake - the lining for the front panel was supposed to be blue. Welp, now it's white, and I also realized I didn't have enough blue fabric to do the collar AND the lining, so I went for a fake lining for which I cut out two blue triangles to be slightly bigger than the lapel

and stitched them to the lining layer so the seams wouldn't be visible on the black outer layer. This was the result:

Pretty happy with it! Next up, even though I don't have the beige tape yet, I decided to cut out the color panels in the front and already pin them down. After some trial and error, I decided to go for 15x4,5cm triangles and calculated the size needed for the shorter ones (9x7,5cm), cut them out of the satin (which, let me tell you, was so finicky it ended up being the most difficult part of it all) laid them down and fastened with pins.

This is what I have so far:

Looking at it in the picture, I'm worried that the color panels take up too much space in the front. It looks like that in the original picture, but in my sketch I made everything a little narrower. But I was also scared of pulling on it too much because the panels are just pinned to the fabric. Some parts are sticking out over the black base layer which maybe also makes it look wider than it really is, I'll cut it to shape once I have the tape and have a better visual understanding of what it's going to look like.

Next up will be the collar/yoke and the dreaded sleeves and possibly the boning. I should do the boning before I attach the beige tape. I am realizing as I’m writing this that I should’ve done the boning before pinning down the colored panels as they’re supposed to cover it. Oh well. It’s fine. Either way, I think it already looks super cool and I can't wait to see the finished product!

Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4|

#fashion history #historical fashion #iwtv #interview with the vampire #lestat de lioncourt #amc iwtv #sewing #redingote #georgian fashion #18th century #18th century fashion #18th century dress #1790s #1790s fashion #georgian #fashion

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catiuskaa · 1 year ago

Text

putting to good use

a short sub!jisung smut because he has been going crazy this comeback and I know it for a fact.

posting bc i have 33 drafts and its making me and tumblr a bit crazy lol

MY MAN NEEDS TO CHILL BECAUSE WOW MAN I CAN HANDLE UP TO A POINT

WC: 0.9k

you had always been Jisung’s utmost supporter, his number 1 fan, and with the last comeback, who could blame his partner for wanting to reward all his hard effort?

“Jagi, i’m home!” He greeted, the smile on his face rolling off on his cheeky tone of voice. Jisung giggled softly at the loud hum you let out as a greeting.

He left his coat on the entrance and then walked to the small office/studio you had both created in the apartment so you two could work from home, soundproof panels adding to the vibe and making it clear that there was an artist among you two.

“Oh, hi baby, how was your day? Aww, it was good, jagi, thanks for asking!” He mocked, resting his shoulder on the doorframe.

You stared at him from above the computer screen, your hand fidgeting with your lips, then just nibbling on them, quickly eyeing back to the device.

Han’s eyebrows shot up. He chewed on his lip, wondering if maybe he had done something to annoy you?

What would normally happen was that you'd smile at him, take your headphones off, and hug him tightly. Not just acknowledge his presence with a hum and a nod, your eyes glued to your computer.

Lost in thought, he went over to the kitchen and took a pack of instant noodles for himself. But he hadn´t finished setting up the pot to heat up the water when your arms slithered their way to his waist, turning him and caging him against the countertop, bodies tight against one another.

"J-Jagi?" He stuttered, flustered from head to toe.

"Thought I wouldn't do anything about it, huh?" Your sly snicker sent chills all over his body, and he gasped when your hips pushed him further against the counter. "You, looking hot, and sweaty, and all bothered on stage..."

Each aspect numbered had been accompanied by a gentle thrust of your hips, and Jisung couldn't —wouldn't— dare to hide the little whimpers that came out of his mouth. You smirked, pressing soft kisses on the corner of his mouth.

"And, that silly little video... taking your jacket off your shoulders... and sticking your tongue out, breathless?" Whispers followed the trail of open-mouthed kisses from his jaw to his shoulders, leaving lipstick stains on the way, and Han's legs wobbled in place, still trying to process what was happening.

He panted when you moved away slightly, almost failing to hold his weight on the counter behind him, feeling the cold marble pressed on his lower back, in contrast to how hot you had made him feel in the blink of an eye.

"I- I just..." he muttered, trying to get back his mind, which turned blank at your movements but was quickly silenced when you bit his lip.

You had never done anything like this. Yes, you liked to talk in bed sometimes, but never so dominating, never making him feel like he was yours to touch, and yours only.

He needed more. Now.

"Oh, baby." You cooed at him. He was seeing stars already, his body reacting to your touch and your whispers in a way he had never felt before. "If you stick your tongue out, you might as well be prepared to use it."

The kiss that followed was messy, like a flame that burned its way down his body, a mix of teeth and tongue that made him crazy. You then cradled his face in your hands and pressed his lips against yours, pulling him tightly against you. His mouth was fierce and eager, kissing you deeply, as if it were the only thing that mattered in the world. He didn't want to stop, so he kept pushing you against him, his fingers tangled in your hair as he held you close, his other hand weakly helping his body stay in place.

"I'm going to put that little mouth of yours to good use. Would you like that, baby?"

He was blushing furiously when you nibbled on his ear, waiting for him to reply, but you laughed when he nodded eagerly.

"Speak, baby. If we're going to do this, I need you to say what you want."

He panted, arousal flooding his body, his mind only able to focus on your body and your voice.

"F-Fuck, darling, please–"

You moved away from him, and he almost fell to the floor, breathing heavily.

You softly took his cheek in your hand, his skin hot and red.

"Such a good boy."

He couldn't help but groan now as he felt the anticipation build up inside him. He felt he was going to wake up at any moment because whatever was going on right now felt like a motherfucking dream.

Jisung let out a flustered sigh when you pushed him to the couch, your thigh spreading his legs open just enough to make him suddenly crave more.

"Be a good boy and don't move now, yeah?"

You felt his body tensing underneath your touch when you bent over, your hands resting on his thighs.

"Are you getting shy, baby?" You whispered tenderly at him, your tone completely different from before. He blushed deeply, not able to look at you when he nodded.

You raised your body and kissed him softly, a loving gesture that made Jisung feel butterflies not only on his belly, but all over his body.

“You are absolutely and undeniably beautiful, and you have no reason to worry about how you look or sound right now. Just enjoy it, baby.”

He cradled your face and kissed you tenderly.

You smiled. "Sit back and relax. I'll have my fun now."

~Kats, who had to stop because she got blocked and started laughing and giggling.

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bladekindeyewear · 23 days ago

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Beyond Canon 2024 October and November Artist/Writer Commentary

So the new Artist and Writer commentary for this month's latest upd8 popped up on Patreon, and even though I've been working (pathetically slowly) on a draft post that goes back through the commentary in order from the past where I left off, I feel like the last two updates have been HAMMER BLOWS in terms of the seriousness, hopelessness, et cetera and I feel like everyone wants answers as badly as I do, and the teaser we got at the end of the last upd8 to whet my excitement can offset the bad news only SO much on its own. So even though I'm kind of too sick to be doing this today, I want to help myself and others cope by liveblogging the last two months' posts of Artist and Writer commentary each so we get some more... words from the word of God on why they're subjecting us to this.

As much of this is Patreon exclusive content I won't be quoting everything, I'll be making just a couple out of context quotes and summarizing or paraphrasing things that I find important to point out about what I'm reading.

I'll put a TL;DR here above the cut once I'm done-- ahem: "Oh yeah Rose was even more doomed to feel fucked in that sort of situation than I realized, and also there's a hiatus because an animation is coming to kick off the End of Act 1 / Start of Act 2, holy shit. Maybe I’d have known that already if I’d read the news posts, oh well".

10-24 Artist Commentary

This is the artist commentary for the update I liveblogged starting here.

They mention how it contains a lot of standout moments, "things are coming to a head in the story"-- there was indeed a climax between this update and the one that followed it, I certainly agree. Since this is the artist commentary, they talk about their appreciation for proposed pacing, the jaw-dropped yelling of some on reading the proposed script... there's a shot of the story board, of course.

They go into some interesting detail on how they went about devising how they wanted Jade's "Space force fields" to look.

Everyone loves Jade's paw-print gloves, as they should.

Haven: this panel showing “how rose ‘sees’ things now” was added late into this update's production and floral didn't have a description other than “haven go wild”

Yes I can certainly believe that. Nice touch in retrospect thematically coloring Rose's blood with her color instead of the literal red it'd be.

"generic troll soldier bumps into a god"-- nice how they're lumping Kanaya in with the god-tiers when referring to the Gods of this world.

Oh I never actually noticed the rebellion's "massive crab tanks" in the background of all these other shots, no wonder they surprised me the following update.

The full hemospectrum of Blood around them grasping hands:

Haven: sometimes very blatant symbolism is the way to go.

exactly, noted, noted...

Some notes on how they did up Jane's office and her bridge, and the storyboard for that BRUTAL scene with Jane and Jake, ow.

Practice the different artists had at drawing Jane and Jake in "Guardian Mode", which is the new clearly adult sorta-hero-moded silhouette term that I probably would have gotten from reading the other artist commentary in order.

Nice thoughts on how even the framed photo of Tavvy next to the blaster button is a distant shot-in-passing photo that doesn't communicate a close family.

The shot, the heal, the turnaround and beatdown.

I got storyboarder brain and I love the excruciating anticipation of making people hold their breath between panels... When you know something’s coming but you can’t help but clasp your hand over your mouth like, “OH NO…”

Yeah, no kidding...

Nothing too concrete to note in this artist commentary, the writer commentary's probably going to be richer. So to save my sanity I'm going to do the next Artist Commentary first:

11-2024 Artist Commentary

This is the artist commentary surrounding the most recent upd8 i liveblogged.

Oh holy shit, this one has some big news I wasn't aware of!

Chumi, hoping you guys had a Happy Thanksgiving: Welcome welcome! 🎉🎉 We’re really getting into the holiday season with this one! Unfortunately, this is our last update until the Flash Production break. Look forward to the Flash guys, we’re working really hard!

I didn't expect them to start off our new session with a big flash, but if they're going to bust out some Animation to really emphasize any new stepping stone in Beyond Canon, the introduction or pre-introduction to The New Session™ is probably the time to do it. I'm pretty busy and/or sick lately (the annoying sort of sick not the dangerous kind) so I'll be glad if it takes a little longer before the next upd8 than it did this one.

They talk about how they carefully gradiated the sky over past updates to reflect the danger closing in, much appreciated.

Tavvy writes with something called "Magic Link" handwriting apparently; they go more into it here.

An Andrew-embossed-seal reference, huh? I'm not gonna elaborate on that but it is funny.

Rose covering the kids' eyes before the shot:

I thought I was so clever putting a bit of shadow underneath her hands… Because her aspect is Light… She’s blocking the Light / knowledge from reaching the kids…That’s why she’s a silhouette too… Heh…

Yep.

Kim: This particular bit gets me every time I think about it… Jade loves her child!!! The way it completely throws Jade off her game when the most precious thing in her life right now is suddenly in the middle of a freaking battlefield of a WAR. These kids just can’t stand still for one minute can they!!

Gahhh, it just tears my heart out. Rose could have stopped this with a word, earlier, but didn't... why not?! What does she KNOW where she sees this path being the better path forward than others?!

Jade getting shot...

Floral: I can feel how much this hurts, it’s so good.

Guhh my heart. Owwwwuch. Can bad things just stop happening to Jade Harley for once? Can some good things start happening where she gets to be cool and not shoved out of the way unceremoniously by the narrative? :C

Okay there's something interesting here.

Floral: I did a single panel for this update too, featuring Dirk’s bell tower and the rest of the human city that stands between it and the meteor site. So much to parse. Wonder what the significance of it all could be.

Implying this has some significance... does it have something to do with what's brought into the game session? With how much IS and how much isn't? Or are dramatic things happening at "Dirk's bell tower" repeatedly being themed to be brought home by something else happening there later? Hmm.

Oh:

The impact is also knocking over whole tanks and the trees around the area, so the Rebellion guys near the meteor are totally vaporized. Sorry fellas. The two peeps in front are just some random soldiers to fill the empty space HEHE.

This explains my confusion around the explosion. The crab tanks I hadn't noticed earlier that they helped point out above, and these indeed being two random soldiers and PROBABLY not a stealth inexplicable Aradia appearance. PROBABLY.

So the "End of Act 1" bit:

Chumi: We are not done with Act 1 just yet…

I was wondering how much the "psyche" meant, if it meant psyche regarding our place within the story, how much was left to go, whether this was a real act ending et cetera... apparently the end of Act 1 is coming somewhat soon from the sound of it, and that gives us an idea of what exactly is planned for this lovable clusterfuck that is Beyond Canon. Is this a three-act tale we're planning, or effectively one, sort of like our three most major build-ups and climaxes across the six acts in the main story (Descend, Cascade, Collide)?

A slight preview sketch of the computer exploding in GC's face you can see if you opt for the Patreon commentary, and that closes out that. Now we'll have a look at the really, REALLY juicy stuff for the last two updates, the WRITER commentary. I'm dreading seeing them drill down into the dread these last two updates gave us before the hope of a new session with our favorite new kid-kids in it, and I'm desperately hoping that as they explain their choices they sprinkle in some EXTRA hope they hadn't given us with Rose's twisted hopeless perspective, because I could use the positive reinforcement.

10-2024 Writer Commentary

Been so excited/apprehensive for this update to drop!! It’s been months and the entire time we’ve been going back and tweaking and playing with things to perfect it and it was worth it. Super satisfied with the response.

Any writers getting ready to write such meaningful dialogue and traumatize their audiences are going to be chomping at the bit to, I've had the taste of that in my mouth before as someone on the writing end and the twists you're ready to unleash can have you salivating even when you know they're going to cause suffering. ESPECIALLY when you know that. It's the entire author's curse that is essentially THE ENEMY in the form of Dirk Strider in this narrative.

And I was inspired to handle it in a way true to a Seer or Light, heavy in lore and reminiscent to Rose’s GameFAQs Walkthrough of the SBURB Beta.

That's a very good inspiration for putting most of Rose's predictions in her narrations below her walking away from that conversation.

They go a lot into the idea of her creating a Spatial shield, whether it would fall into the confines of her powerset. I like a lot of the keywords used here:

A stray missile comes towards them and the shield won’t bounce it off but manipulate and control the space around it.

Note the keywords 'manipulate and control', the change/control/manipulate keywords we've always held so central to the theorized Witch role and possibly the Heir role by extension.

And ultimately:

I think in general, a lot of aspected powers are limited only by the user’s imagination! But even putting that aside, it makes a lot of sense to me that she’d have the tight control necessary of a spatial perimeter necessary to do something as basic as maintain a shield. We’ve seen her do way crazier shit before.

--who could disagree?

FLORAL: There was a lot to explore with this conversation between Rose and Jade, the first one they’ve had privately since fucking… ACT 5, 2011?

Yeah, they barely got STARTED with the unpacking. And Rose refused to continue it because she foresaw that it'd be ultimately pointless.

Many thoughts of how their dynamic could be and how their dynamic would evolve under current conditions went into it and it was so fun!! Writing two people that obviously understand one another so well while feeling completely misunderstood and frustrated because they’re not being empathized with is complicated! But exactly how you show a character's specific perspective the best in my opinion. Rose and Jade share a lot of experiences, especially considering their Aspect switcheroo fake out, and have taken such completely different lessons from them. I love their friction!

What's also unsaid here is how their Aspect switcharoo fake out was also secretly potentially paired with a REAL class switcharoo in the form of role inversion that they BOTH underwent, Jade getting a distrust of Seeing and Rose gaining a distrust of Witchcraft in making any ultimate difference as this wasn't the way they were best meant to operate as themselves, but can't help but project onto each other when stressed.

We know from Meat that even without all of Candy’s baggage they aren’t close. So why? There are very probable, passive answers and then there are equally probable drama answers, that actively communicate parts of these characters we never got to see clash.

Really interesting. And yeah, we DID get to see that from this update.

MILES: I think, and this is something that we’re going to touch on later in this commentary/update, part of that is that they really aren’t that compatible in terms of their interpersonal problem solving styles.

We talked about this in a great deal of detail surrounding the update in question, and I'm glad they were intentionally provoking us to think about these things!

Okay there's a section here that I'm going to quote in FULL from the Patreon commentary, and it also outlines a divide, a HUGE rift between Candy Jade and Candy Rose that Meat Jade/Rose wouldn't have experienced, and the tragedy of its basic inevitability because of how events turned out:

MILES: And speaking of dear, sweet Yiffy, and the way Rose and Jade’s attitudes differ, there really isn’t a better example of their incompatibility than the two entirely polarized attitudes they take towards Yiffy’s existence: Rose’s detached view of Yiffy as amounting to nothing more than an inconvenient favor she did for a friend, as part of a cosmic obligation she barely even understands (more on this later), spits directly in the face of Jade’s knowledge that Yiffy is, without question, the most important thing in her life. It’s arguably “right” that Rose chose to completely sterilize any feelings she might possibly have had (but probably barely even ever did) for Yiffy in terms of maintaining some modicum of emotional fidelity to her Actual Wife and her Actual Daughter, but obviously that’s going to chafe Jade. Jade’s a lonely person! Yiffy was a way to fill that void, and although having a daughter has absolutely brought some purpose, companionship, and stability to her life, the complications that came along with it have absolutely served to isolate her even more in other ways.

:'(

With all the setups being given to us like Dave's stuffed corpse falling out of Jade's pocket, or the idea of Kanaya finding "new love" before Rose is saved that she refused to Foresee (I'm still banking on that Light Between Space OT3, you can't stop me), I'm really hoping that Candy Jade can both live through this and come to a MUCH LESS LONELY peace than she's come to in other timelines we've been forced to witness. I don't want Meat Jade to be the only Jade that comes out of this healthier and happier than she went in.

The commentary gets into Jade and Rose's debate on what Truth means, from a Light perspective or a Space perspective almost...

That’s why it was felt important to comment on Rose’s estranged relationship to Roxy too, in her ramble. Really cementing questions that were hinted at before, can you find closure in another, younger version of your dead parent? How does that evolve over the years?

I really hope that we get a version of Rose and Roxy out of at LEAST one of the two ongoing timelines that end up MUCH closer than this update implied Rose's parental relationship had forced them to stay estranged rather than get closer like they could have, possibly should have. I want them to come to terms with each other because they could be SUCH good sisters to each other. And maybe in the Meat timeline when they're put into direct conflict, when Roxy achieves some sort of victory over Rose, Void over the gaps in Ultimate Light, that it finally punches through her emotional barriers and lets that version of Rose accept her essentially-sister the way her Candy Self never let happen.

And now we get to that horrifying future-sight screed of Rose into the narrative text zone...

FLORAL: Everything Rose talks about in her monologue was so, so nerve wracking to write, to take so many points of what makes this character who they are laid out for the reader.

Yeah, it made so little sense why she'd say such callous things to Kanaya earlier unless she had been DELIBERATELY trying to push her away... which as it turned out in this monologue, she absolutely had been, having foreseen her own coma.--

Which is hard for serialized media because you guys don’t get those answers the way you would if you were watching a movie or a book, there’s real time waiting completely out of your control. It’s anxiety inducing! I’ve had a good deal of Homestuck induced anxiety myself lol.

Hell to the fucking yes. We're all feeling that incredible anxiety and only the writer knows, for sure, that it's all going to turn out okay, but we the readers have to wait in limbo with our anxieties gnawing at us all the while.

MILES: I totally get where you’re coming from, on that. This bit felt like a part we really did need to write, partially for that exact reason; taking the readers on an exciting voyage to the twisted shores of Rose’s nihilisthmus is a peek behind the curtains that hopefully DOES serve to contextualize just how checked out she is and provide some more clarification on why it is she’s acting the way she does.

Instead of taking individual text blocks, Miles is going to give us the whole shebang summary, so I'll pull it straight out of the patreon commentary wholesale since anyone suffering like me probably ought to hear it with me:

Overall, as a Light player trapped in a universe/timeline/whatever-you-want-to-call-Candy devoid of “real” narrative consequence (and thusly, devoid of any “real” fortune that might seek to inform her Light-aspected guidance), she’s been sort of adrift! Imagine having access to a cosmic intuition that points you towards what’s “best” and then, one day, you notice it’s broken. Still trying, but broken nonetheless. Rose is already predisposed towards existential malaise; she’s always needed action to fill that void, and when the little voice in your head suddenly starts telling you that you live in a world where action is fundamentally meaningless, coping with that reality probably... fucking sucks! She has nonetheless done an admirable job of trying to keep herself anchored with a wife she DOES care for and a daughter she DOES love, but fighting the creeping thought that none of it means anything at all? Having what you believe is objective cosmic confirmation of nihilism woven into the foundation of the reality you inhabit? That’s scary shit. Honestly, it’s kind of a wonder she’s even as sane as she is, but Rose, for better or worse, is quite the badass. Not great for the people around her, though.

I'm starting to see, that's useful additional information. Rose's Seer of Light powers aren't just telling her that this timeline doesn't matter, they're also almost broken to the point of uselessness by the fact that so little 'matters' in the entire world. And those malfunctioning powers have been reinforcing her nihilism just as much as the message that this is a Doesn't Matter Timeline is. Gosh that's depressing... and I hope what Vriska, the Plot Point, and the New Session pulling in their children does manages to eventually shake her out of it, even if she needs to get miraculously saved from a coma first.

Moving on...

Karkat and Kanaya clasping hands being awesome, yeah.

Jake and Jane's confrontation. As much as they wanted in their hearts to give Jake a win, they had to make him lose here because Jane is just too wildly powerful to fall to him when he'd only just turned around, and had to make it sentimental and personal instead of doing something cold and unloading enough lead into her to kill a God of Healing, which wasn't something he'd prepared himself to do, doing something more Jake and "cinematic" instead.

Then we cut back to the kids, and the next update:

11-2024 Writer Commentary

Okay, here we go. What are you going to give us from that last update that was such an emotional whiplash of impacts?

FLORAL, loving some bacon: THE HOMEWRECKER IS DEAD!!!!!!

God damnit XD You fucking jokesters.

Some comments they have about Jake's letter here, which seems unintentionally tailor made to provoke Vrissy into a frenzy:

We’ve been trying to give him a little shade of passive aggression, just a hint of spice, and I think this letter was a fun place for that. “Sorry but you guys are kind of weak as fuck, can’t do a single backflip, and so you need to sit here and eat these considerately provided packages of snacks while a real gymnast handles shit.” It’s a flex, but I think it also demonstrates his caretaker tendencies.

I'm trying to dissect what they're saying about him and more could mean about, like, his potential Class and Aspect, but I'm coming up with bupkis aside from all our previous scattershot analyses. Gymnasts can be Breath, Breath can be Provokers, and plenty of classes can be Caretakers, but... I'm still not entirely sure where Tavvy is going to land on the hero spectrum.

MILES: Unfortunately, he probably should have accounted for the fact that these two aren’t really inclined to listen to him. When Tavvy flips the script on their established relationship dynamic, as he has quite a bit these days, it rubs at least Vrissy the wrong way.

Yeah it didn't seem like Tavvy was TRYING to provoke Vrissy to run out in rage and try to do something heroic to keep her kismesis from showing her up, but he definitely had that effect unintentionally as hard as it possibly could have been, and any variety of Breath player could have unintentionally managed that, even a Bard. The Caretaker thing is being reinforced by the soda and snacks though, and this writer commentary... is it pointing to a specific caretaker class like a Maid of Breath? Hmm.

On Jade dying right in front of them:

Clearly shit is popping off a bit more flagrantly than the kids imagined.

To put it mildly, yeah.

Tensions have been building for a while, but blood’s been definitively drawn now. It’s been a lot of setup to get to this point, but it’s super satisfying to see it all reach a boiling point here, even if it comes at the cost of poor sweet Jade’s cranial structural integrity.

Everything this entire-- well, "Act", now that we KNOW it's an Act, has been building towards THIS climax in particular. A moment where so much shit goes down that we can officially say in every way that Shit Has Gone Down, and they had to herald it in with SOMETHING shocking I guess... especially if they want to neutralize the lingering macguffin that is Candy Calliope's spare Ring of Life if I had to guess from the hints they've been dropping.

The act curtain drop, the psyche, and...

MILES: You’ll notice that, with this little gag (which felt so fun to do, by the way), we’ve returned to the ACT structure, abandoning the CHAPTER format HS^2 utilized before the production change. This was a point of a lot of thought, for us, but ultimately we think that the Act structure makes more sense for the story it is that we’re trying to tell, for a variety of reasons that I’m not gonna get TOO into here.

With a new session on the cusp of starting, I can really imagine why.

That said, we’re coming up to the climax of what we consider... I don’t know, the “setup” period of the plot? It’s been a long, long road, and it’s tough to say what final percentage of HS:BC this whole saga is going to represent, but capping it off all under the purview of one Act feels appropriate. Everything, from the beginning of HS^2 to now, has been dedicated to fully selling the transition from the Epilogues to what has become Homestuck: Beyond Canon. It’s been just over a year of updates on our end, and it’s so crazy to see this arc getting ready to finish!

That confirms a feeling I was getting but wasn't sure whether to confirm. That the entire time we've been experiencing HS^2, interrupted by that long hiatus in between, was meant to be a setup for THIS moment where we realize a new session is starting, and we're dumped fuck deep into the Game Session format with all the establishing situations and incoming vectors and player collisions to come laid out like bullets streaming in converging on a single point of impact.

And to finish it out, they analyze our new Dark Purple Text Friend!

HAVEN: “Negging” this is new! And again with this 108 number pattern, how curious.

I genuinely forgot they did that 108 earlier in Vriska's plot point. Read back on my Homestuck Liveblog tag for people pointing out the significance of that as HS:BC's act number.

This person seems to drag on each sentence... Before snapping back to finality.

A trait I hadn't noticed besides the bombs, but a trait one bomb-and-fuse oriented could be reasonably said to have without indicating to us which Doom class this obviously-Doom-player is.

HAVEN: A lot of information here! TC and AA, who are curious characters and what could their roles be? (well I suppose you could guess their upcoming roles.)

There probably ARE hints to TC and AA's literal hero roles, their classes and aspects (such as Oracle being listed there), but we don't have enough of them on hand to tell the wheat from the chaff just yet beyond that. I'm sure we're going to be getting piles of hints in the coming pages both up through and after and possibly within whatever flash-like animation they're taking extra time to cook up for us to celebrate the miracle of this new beginning.

They point out GC's "and we did spend a lot of time on it..." meaning they're the ones that must have coded this new incarnation of The Game out of the Ruins codebase.

HAVEN: Here I think there was going to be a line specifying they had “47 friends lined up” but it got switched out. JAMES: I wonder if that's important. I guess we still need to be sort of coy about it.Which is horseshit. HAVEN: Yeah, that IS horseshit! Anyway our coyness continues.

I like how they wanted to make at least a JOKING reference to a 48-player Squiddle session that isn't going to happen, because I'm still betting that somewhere between 8 and 16 people is the most we can comfortably fit in a new plot like this, not to mention the Gene pattern that seems to be being followed so far, but we'll have to see.

Alright, that's the end of four posts of commentary. I've gained a LITTLE bit of meaningful information and some expectations on the upcoming timeline, and I hope you have too, and I also hope I didn't pull so much out of the Patreon exclusive info that y'all don't feel discouraged to chip into Homestuck Beyond Canon too like I'm doing if you have extra dosh to spare (but only to spare, don't impact your livelihood if you need the money for important/life things, that's advice they and anyone else would give you).

I'm feeling slightly less sick by luck now that I've rammed all this typing out of my fingers, and hopefully y'all feel a little less of the ominousness that can't help but hang around recent in-canon events. Phew.

I see in the Patreon comments some commenters are extrapolating from that cut "48" that Dirk wants to create the session that made the TROLL session (with the trolls' 48 star signs) to complete a solid loop, which I concede is possible, but I doubt his goals are really all that pedestrian, that wouldn't make him the most important the way he's aiming-- you already have my counter-speculation in hand that Dirk intends to create the session that gave birth to the chess game ITSELF, that gave birth to the Prospit/Derse system and the very seed session for the propagation of Paradox Space. Alt!Calliope seems like they're practically in alignment with him on the goal, wanting to tie Beyond Canon back down into a neat self-causing loop excepting that Alt!Callie's intending to ensure he doesn't get to make himself the Author Of All That Exists, no matter who it hurts when she forces the issue, which makes Alt!Calliope not much different from him. And between these dueling forces, we have the ever-underestimated plans of Calliope and Roxy across both timelines, the Muse of Space and the Rogue of Void, who seem to have SUCCEEDED in collaborating knowingly or unknowingly across the timelines to use Vriska as a shunt to SOMEHOW get the Candy Kids to be important friends and players in this new Game, bringing things all full circle in a way not even Alt!Calliope thought would save their home timeline but quite possibly can. How exciting!

It hurts, sometimes, but gosh do I still love Homestuck. See y'all whenever that next hiatusy bombastic probably Flash-animation-like update goes up in a month or two or however long it takes them, bless their diligent crazy hearts.

#Homestuck #hs2 #Homestuck Liveblog #Homestuck^2 #Writer Commentary #Artist Commentary #Patreon Commentary #Rose Lalonde #Jade Harley #Tavros Crocker #Light and Void #Kanaya #gavageCunctation #Beyond Canon #Dirk Strider #Alt!Calliope

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aioliravioli-69 · 9 months ago

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Detective Noir AU

Alright, this au has been sitting around, waiting for me to finish it but chances are, I never will :((

So instead, I'll just post what I have so far

This was inspired by that one comment on the au post the author made(at this point you could consider me a stalker for the amount of hours I've scrolled through her feed💀)

First things first, none other than our main character himself, Detective Hollow!

I made him the detective in this one mainly because I was basing it off of the theory that if there was no heroine the keyholder would simply become the hero instead(don't remember where I read this but I'm guessing it was the webtoon comment section).

I also my have just really wanted to draw him in an overcoat

gonna be honest, I did little to no research going into this AU, the thing I most tried to learn about was the femme fatale so I could get a good view on how to design Buddy

Speaking of the femme fatale:

Seems like someone got caught in the spotlight!

And before you ask, yes, those are pants. Weird ones, but pants nonetheless. I swear, I hate lighting when it's from the front. Frontal lighting can go fuck itself. Please ignore the little help lines I put in

Honestly, Buddy's outfit was probably the hardest part of this one. I wanted him to look slutty, but I didn't want to make it TOO slutty, but I feel like I may have added WAYY too many folds in his pantsuit and I kinda messed up on the overcoat lol. The diamond on his chest was inspired by the diamond on the villainess key more than anything and I tried to incorporate that into his gloves too.

Anyway, have some potential outfit sketches I made:

the two I thought might come off as too slutty and

the ultimate winner of the outfit ideas

As you can see the diamond chest window and fur coat were a mut in this outfit and I'm pretty happy with the end result

Y'all know how the femme fatale usually has to seduce the main character a.k.a. the detective?

Well, y'all know me so have an extra just for you <33

But I'm not done just yet!

Remember how I said that I made Chase the hero because of the lack of a heroine in the story? Well...

I did some more surface level research(and I mean very surface level) and decided to adapt the trope of the girl-next-door archetype for him!!

Don't think it suits him, since they usually just sit pretty and wait for the detective to notice them, but they do have badass roles once in a while and I live for those!!!

The one Chase has taken on doesn't though sadly :')

I decided to go with Charlie Hollow for this one because it sounded more like something the timid and 'pure'(yuck I know, but sadly film noir movies often prop up comparisons between the femme fatale and the girl-next-door, this being one of them) girl next door would have

Overall I tried to make this one as cutesy as possible because, why not lol

Lastly(I apologise, I made this in a rush because I was running out of motivation)

The distance between Buddy and the detective sure did close QUICK-

Originally I was planning on adding Deacon as a police officer and now that I think about it I could technically fit Prunella in here as well, but I just don't have any willpower left to keep this thing alive

My art blocks been acting up recently and I can't even pick up the pencil without immediately wanting to put it down :((

I wish I could have continued this and maybe I will someday, but until then this'll just stay in my drafts

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the-s1lly-corner · 11 months ago

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Shut In (Eyeless Jack x reader oneshot!)

Basic plot: its really cold outside, and you urge Jack to stay in your home with you... he decides to stay despite knowing full well that he will be fine out in the freezing temperatures. You both decide to do things to pass the time and stay warm! Turns out Jack can make a mean cup of hot coco, too

Extra notes: I dont usually write fanfics, and the last one I've written was a personal one from late August... so to say I'm rusty and underexperienced is an understatement! I feel this one ended up a little.. weirdly paced imo but I think I'm still happy with the end result! Dialogue I feel I could have done better on but I'm going to be nice to myself since I mostly write hc posts so this is way out of my comfort zone.. Drafted on Tumblr then sent through google docs to pick up on some mistakes I missed, briefly reread no proper proof reading imo... lets hope this isnt a train wreck + it copied back to tumblr okay!! LMAO

Brief joke about pregnancy/making a pregnancy but its like one small snippet but I know that can make people uncomfortable + implies at least one of the characters is AFAB

Word Count: 2915

Extra Admin's note: I want to say again that I am so so happy about this blog hitting 1k followers, when I first started this blog I was originally going to use it to burn time and have something to do on the side, as well as having a place to put out my cringe ideas and hcs. I never thought this many people would be interested in my dumb thoughts, but here we are! I intend to keep writing this year, and perhaps even make more non-celebratory one shots this year? Maybe? I don't know I guess we'll see the reception on this fic!

It was the middle of the night, around the middle of January. Your boyfriend and you were holed up inside your apartment, you having locked the man up with you after seeing that it was below freezing out, as well as raining. You had to practically beg your boyfriend to stay with you for the night.

Your boyfriend, who also just so happened to be a man eating demon with tar dripping out of his hollowed out eye sockets. Your boyfriend, who was currently sitting still and staring forward, the only sound in the apartment coming from the dripping of your faucet. You had asked him to come visit you, it'd been a while... and he would never ever let you go to his cabin when it's this cold out. So here you both were now.

You pat the palms of your hands on your knees, sucking in one of your cheeks and working the flesh through your jaws for a moment. You were both technically stuck in the apartment now; you didn't want Jack to go out and risk getting sick, and Jack more than likely wouldn't want you to step out for the same reasons. So, you were both confined to what you already had within the space. You were about to open your mouth to speak but Jack broke the silence first. "You're shivering, do you want me to get some blankets?", blunt and almost robotic. He was never that expressive. "Or would you like to go to your room?" He added after a brief pause, his fangs poking just over his lip before he readjusted his mouth. You were both in the living room, sitting together on the couch; the front door to your left and a view of the kitchen to the right. You thought for a minute as your eyes lingered on the kitchen for a moment. You'd already eaten, before your partner arrived... but..

"That's fine, I'm probably going to make some hot coco," You pulled yourself up, stretching up. "Powdered stuff ooor..?" Jack mimicked you. You only shook your head, earning a disapproving look from him. "What?" You questioned, but he only dismissed you. "Why don't you get some blankets, I'll handle it," and he turned on his heel to make his way to the kitchen. "Maybe put on a movie, too, your choice." He added as his voice carried off. "Are you saying I can't cook?" You called back, following after him. No answer as he tugged out a pot. "I'll have you know-" you started once more

"Do you have half and half?" He was already opening your pantry to grab things.

"No, I don't,"

"Heavy cream? Whipping cream? Whatever it's called..." He mumbled as he placed various ingredients on the counter. Cocoa powder, vanilla, salt and sugar. You only nodded, and as he was about to begin working he paused. "Do you want anything else in it? Cinnamon? Nutmeg?" He paused and through gritted teeth, "Coffee?"

It was almost midnight, of course he would be opposed to you having caffeine so late.

"Cinnamon is fine," You watched him get to work. He measured everything out; even mixing the heavy cream with some milk to make a substitute for half and half.... was that really all it was? You weren't sure what you expected it to be, if it weren't..

He pulled his head up and stared at you. It was then that you noticed he had actually taken his mask off and set it at the end of the counter and out of the way. The black ooze dripping from his eyes was slow and posed little threat to dripping into your drink. He had a fistful of napkins on standby to dap his face dry should the flow quicken. "Aren't you going to get the blankets?"

You pat your hands on your thighs, pausing... watching him. His body had a warm glow on him from the old light bulb in the ceiling; it flickered every now and then. Under the yellowed light he almost looked healthy and alive, though there was no glint where his eyes should have been. His sharp nail tapping on the counter brought you back to the moment, blinking a few times. "Yeah.." you mumbled, defeated at the chance of making a drink for yourself stolen from you. But was that so bad?

You backed out of the kitchen, dragging your feet across the floor. Your apartment was.. a little on the smaller side so within a few steps you were in front of your bedroom door. You didn't really pay much attention to your surroundings as you shuffled through the blankets on the bed.. eventually you settled on just grabbing an arm full and waddling back to the living room, dumping everything you had grabbed onto the couch.

The house smelled of cinnamon and chocolate.. with a hint of vanilla.

Turning your gaze to the tv, your eyes scanned across the DVDs you had stacked messily. Nothing sounded good. "Is there anything you want specifically?" You called out as you settled yourself down criss cross in front of the tv and pulling all the cases onto the floor next to you. "Movie wise," You added as you pulled the first case into your hands. The DVD collection for Child's Play.. you had gotten it a few weeks ago, finding it on sale at your local store. You still hadn't popped it in to watch..

"I have.. Chucky, uhm..." You shuffled for the next case. "All the movies by the way.. I have that and.. most of the Friday the 13th movies," You called out. No answer, the only sound coming from the kitchen was the noise of a whisk gently being stirred. "I don't have Jason goes to hell... But!" You pulled out a third case with the Nightmare on Elm Street DVDs. "I DO have Freddy vs Jason," You mumbled and spread the three disks on the floor in front of you. Most of the disks you had, you noticed, were mostly older slasher movies. Still, Jack hadn't answered you. You pull yourself to your feet and trudge back into the kitchen. His back was to you, too preoccupied with the stove... He hadn't noticed you, not yet. An idea blossomed in your head, a smirk pulling itself across your lips. You steeled yourself, trying to force yourself to stop shivering.. Jack was always paying attention to his surroundings, this was a once in a lifetime opportunity.

You take a step forward and he still doesn't notice your approach.

Another step.

And another.

Jack wasn't the tallest, in fact if you wanted to you could rest your chin on his shoulder... and that's what you ended up doing, while wrapping your arms around his thick waist. You could feel his body seize up just a little bit against you, before relaxing. "You didn't answer, what sounds good?" You pulled your eyes down to look at the pot. Your drink was nearly finished. You view rocked as your boyfriend shrugged, still silent but the twitching of his pointed ears let you know he was listening.

"Anything's fine," Another shrug as he cuts the heat. "You're the one cooking for me, you get to pick the movie," You insisted. He paused mid-whisk, letting out a soft huff. Suddenly he spun around, his face just a few inches from yours. In the dimmed light his eye sockets seemed deeper, it's black ooze lazily dripping down his cheeks. You noticed the smudges on his face, from wiping the streaks. You briefly wondered what it was like to sleep with them, but your thoughts were cut short as he pulled a blackened and clawed hand to your hair; tucking a lock behind your ear. "How does...." He paused, sucking in his teeth. He looked almost embarrassed. "Bride of Chucky sound?"

"What? Want to study the characters again so we can dress up again this year for Halloween?" You tease. You had convinced him a few months ago to dress up with you. With him as Chucky, and you as Tiffany... It had taken some begging and convincing but you ultimately got him to agree. Although you didn't go out to get candy, you were both fine with staying inside watching movies together in costume. It was also that night you got him to watch the movies..

His ears darkened, before he scoffed. "No... actually this year I was thinking of..." He took a long pause, visibly scraping his brain for names of characters, before seemingly giving up. "Look I don't watch many movies I don't know any.. characters.." He grimaced, before gently pushing you off of him so he could turn his attention back to the hot cocoa. "We've still got nine months, more than enough time to come up with something..." You shrugged, then smirked. "Not enough time to make a Glen... or Glenda," You teased before turning on your heel. You held back a snicker as you heard Jack splutter, finally processing what you had just said to him.

"W-"

"I'm gonna go ahead and put in the disc, I'll leave it paused for you," You cut him off, still grinning to yourself as you kneeled down to do as you had said.

Soon enough Jack walked into the room with a mug, as well as a platter of cookies. "You didn't have to," You mumbled as you eyed the treats, but he only waved you off as he placed the plate and mug onto the coffee table. "You don't have to eat them, but I figured you might want a snack while watching the movie," He mumbled. You took the mug, and swirled the drink inside of it. "I hope I didn't put in too much cinnamon," Jack added as he watched you. He leaned over and started the movie.

You took a sip, smiling a little as the warmness crept in. "You did good, probably the best hot cocoa I've ever had." You offered a grin to him. "That has got to be the fakest compliment I've ever heard," Jack shot back, though you could see the corners of his mouth turning up just slightly. "Oh, I'm sorry! I believe this is the most decadent and satisfying beverage I've had ever been graced with in my life, and-" You began, only for Jack to hush you. "I'd rather you throw it on me, don't... say words like that again," He grumbled as readjusted himself into the couch. You took a sip and shrugged, "It's just absolutely immaculate," and he lightly smacked you on the arm. "I'm never making anything for you again," He snorted, before turning his attention to the movie.

You weren't going to lie, you felt a little bad treating yourself to the cookies, knowing Jack was unable to eat them without upsetting his stomach. Being a man-eating monster must really be hard. You purse your lips, and shoot a look at him from the corner of your eye. He must have been doing the same, because he turned his head to look at you. "Do you want to do something else?" He asked lightly, his grin from a few minutes ago already faded. "Do you ever miss eating.. food?" You asked before you could stop yourself. He didn't bother pausing the movie, instead he just fell silent and stared down, into the space between the two of you on the couch.

"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have brought it up, I know it's a touchy subject for you," You mumbled and put the mug on the table. You sucked in the air between your teeth, flicking your eyes up to the movie, before bringing them back down to your lap. It stayed like that for a minute before Jack broke the silence. "I mean... yeah, I do. But at least I don't have to eat every day like you do, means I can have more time to do what I want," He said. Clearly, he was still bothered, tip-toeing around the big.. thing about him. The air was still tense and thick, all of the previous joking gone now. It was nearly unbearable. Nearly.

"You know," Jack began after a few more seconds of silence when you didn't reply. "I've never tried cinnamon in hot cocoa, I didn't know that was a thing people did," He was changing the subject. "You haven't?" You asked, raising a brow. He eyed your mug, but you both knew there was no way he was going to take a sip.

"It's really good," You mumbled, and took the drink, "The combo, I mean," You added. He hummed, patting his knees lightly. You swirled the drink again, watching the... what was it called? Those lighter swirls in the drink.. Did that have a name?

"You've had hot cocoa before, right?" You asked. He hummed again, nodding his head. "Well.. the cinnamon makes it warm. Taste wise.. It makes it.." You took a sip and thought for a minute. "Richer, I guess? It's hard to explain," You muttered, then looked back at him. You tore your eyes back down when you saw he was looking right at you, totally hooked onto your words. "I hear nutmeg goes good in it, too.. but I've only tried nutmeg and chocolate together in baked goods," You shrugged. "You did really good with this, you know... not too much cinnamon.. not spicy, at least." You smiled. He nodded, before turning back to the movie.

"Woody, I hear people describe cinnamon like that," He leaned back into the couch, a dull pop came from his back.

"Woody," You repeated, then took a large sip of the hot cocoa. You put the mug down onto the table, and leaned into your boyfriend as the warmth crept and settled into your bones. You weren't even paying attention to the movie, your mind was now occupied with how tired you were. Your eyes slipped up to the clock on the wall, It was nearly one in the morning. Had it only been an hour since Jack walked himself into the kitchen?

You lean deeper into Jack, not caring about his body's natural chill. His clothing still smelled a little like the cocoa from earlier.. "Gotta invest in some cologne, you smell nice like this," You mumbled into his arm. "The cinnamon?" He asked, not looking down at you. "No.. the cocoa, I mean cinnamon would be a nice touch... but you don't seem like a sweet smelling guy, do you?" You muttered. "Are you already getting tired?" Jack asked, and he leaned over you to grab the remote, pausing the movie. You muttered, the heat of the hot cocoa doing way more than you expected on the tiredness you didn't notice you had. "A little," You shrugged, "But we can still try to finish the movie," You offered, but he shook his head. Of course he would, as much of a hard ass or party pooper he came off as, he was going to make sure you were going to get your rest.

You put your hand in his, the one that had the remote.. you unpaused the movie. He paused it, and you unpaused it again. It kind of kept up like this before Jack conceited and kept it playing, although he did lower the volume.. The subtitles were already on, though. "I win," You smirked up at him, before crawling into his lap. You placed your head on his chest, pausing when you felt him stiffen before relaxing against you. His heart beat for a moment before settling to its barely there rhythm. For a minute you thought about asking about his heart, as far as you knew he explained himself like he was becoming a walking corpse... how does that work?

You decided against it, you already asked about him earlier.. and besides, your mind was already beginning to blank as Jack reached to the side of the couch, and turned the lamp off.. It was dark now. It was still raining, you could more clearly hear the drops outside now that the movie was turned down. Plus, Jack was running his fingers through your hair, lightly massaging your scalp. It wouldn't be long until you finally gave in and fell asleep.

"Are you going to still be here in the morning?" You asked, melting into his chest as he hummed in response. "Plan on it, I still need to clean up the kitchen," He added as he curled your hair around his hand. "It'll still be cold in the morning," He added, "I need to make sure you bundle up before you go out for work," He added. "I'm not that dumb," You muttered and lightly slapped his arm. You swear, if he still had his eyes he would have rolled them.

"How do you see? I know you're not.. a normal person, but," You blurted out, lifting your head. He pushed your face back down, shushing you. "Sleep," He ordered, before loosening his hold on you a bit so you could get comfortable. It wasn't an order but it may as well have been with how your body started to loosen into him within the next few minutes, quickly snuffling out your curiosity and questions.

He'd still be here in the morning, you could pester him then. After all, it's what he signed up for when the two of you started to date one another..

#creepypasta x reader #creepypasta x you #creepypasta imagine #eyeless jack x reader #eyeless jack x you #eyeless jack imagine #creepypasta fanfic #eyeless jack fanfic

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circular-bircular · 5 months ago

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I'm putting this blog to rest.

I'm done. I'm out. And god, is it a relief.

You might notice I'm posting this around the same time that SAS is posting a major post in an effort to light the tag on fire. I highly doubt it'll work, but it's the best attempt. Me and SAS are close. Nearly one in the same, some days...

You'll notice the end of the post says, "just wait for what happens next."

This is what happens next.

I'm deleting my syscourse blogs. Finally. No "maybe I will" or "I've been considering it." I've been considering it for a loooong time, and I've actually been intending on getting rid of Circular's-Reasoning for awhile now. I just... haven't had the energy to.

But now... My life is moving on. I'm moving on, quite literally, I gain possession of my new house... probably today when I end up posting this. I'm not sure, it's my first draft, we'll see how this goes. That's terrifying to realize. I'm like... an adult. I'm an adult who's craving good conversations about my disorder, about systemhood and how it's conceptualized, and more intricate parts of my selfhood. And... Syscourse just is not that.

I've done this sort of thing before, if you all know MotCR -- @memoriesofthecircularroom, for the uninitiated. That's the OG Circular Blog, and is an archive of the first few years of syscourse. But... Now, it's going to become a bit more. Here's my game plan.

I update MotCR to be the Circular Archive. Anything I think needs archiving -- good posts of mine, silly reblogs, or just good posts overall where I added something of my own -- will get reblogged there. It's gonna be busy for a bit.

In the meantime while I start that process, I answer any and all final questions/asks or drafts that've been in the works. I don't want to leave people hanging.

I delete a lot of blogs. And... I do mean a lot -- not even just the syscourse ones. Just the ones I think it's time to let go of.

I've often teased how many blogs I have. It's fluctuated wildly in the past. But here's the down and dirty. Here's what I own, and what I'm planning on removing.

@circular-bircular (Hi, Hello, You're Here)

@circulars-reasoning (Already planned to be gone awhile ago)

@systemquirks (I just don't have the energy to run it, and I'm so sorry for that)

@yourfaveissecretlysas (Yes, I am the one running that)

@system-confessions (Surprise! No name blog that barely exists, again, I don't have the energy)

@debunkingsyscourse (Look, I make these too easily)

@equalsys (Not sure how this is a shocker to anyone)

@ricejustdidthings (An old system-no-syscourse blog I have that I don't use anymore)

@my-systems-cringe (Been meaning to delete this for ages)

@circulars-answers (Unneeded)

And potentially one other, unnamed for now blog -- that's the one I've never told people I have outside of select discords...

So that's 11 blogs I'm getting rid of, potentially more. And that's with me still keeping 2 syscourse blogs and an 18+ system blog. Jesus christ.

It feels good to get it off my chest, though. It feels really good to be leaving.

"But Circ! Your posts make me happy!"

Fantastic! You can follow the new system blog I'm going to be making, @thecircularsystem (is that link working? I don't know, it's a brand new blog.)

Try this link out instead if that doesn't work!

I'm still going to be posting system related content there. I'm still going to be doing my normal random shit that I always do. I may even dabble in syscourse -- and definitely in sysconversation. I like that tag! But I'm not going to be doing syscourse nearly as often, and I'm going to try and stay out of that tag in search of reblogs and such. Too often, it results in me getting aggressive with someone, rather than just... spreading good information about systems, or existing online as I want to exist.

I just need a refresh. A new step, a big change. I'm moving on.

I really hope you all can too <3

#aaaaah #god this felt good to write up #it stayed in first draft territory by the way #not tagging as syscourse because it’s not really about that #it’s about my health #feel free to follow my new blog if you want #I spent like. an hour setting it up at least #Armageddon comes while I’m sleeping

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good-griief · 2 years ago

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Time ; Regret

here's part two of "time"! i'm sure you all don't want me to end it here, so even tho i think it'd be a little cruelly funny to leave it up in the air like this, i promise there will be a part three— tho that will be the last part. this part is pretty dialogue-heavy, so i hope you enjoy the 'voices' i gave the characters<33

note sorry to have to post this again but tumblr posted it at the complete wrong time from my schedule and it wasn’t the right draft :( ( some kind of phone to computer mix up idk what happened</3 )

warnings ambiguous relationship/feelings between abby and reader, reference to romance, implications of unrequited love (it's not), she/her reader, lasting effects of torture to reader, morally grey reader, mention of joel's death/torture, ambiguous/story-teller dependent interpretation of major past event between characters

tags @frogtits1 @sawaagyapong @augieee21 @sunkissedbibi @eden-nox

part one part three

link to chapter 2 on ao3

After that, Abby decided against hugging you again, knowing she’d just get emotional. She didn’t know how you’d react to that anymore, so she played her safest bet and explained what happened from a distance, offering to help you work as she did. You didn’t react, but she could tell how upset you were just because you were so quiet.

When she offered to come over that night, you agreed immediately, and when she came to your house, you opened the door with puffy red eyes and swollen lips. She gave you a somber smile. “Come on.” She opened her arms for you, holding you for a moment before she came inside. “They wouldn’t want you to cry,” she said, trying to say something comforting you might, and it coming out improperly. It made you chuckle at her attempt, making her sigh as she stepped away from you. “I’m still not the best at comforting people,” she said quietly, shutting your door behind her as she entered with a small smile. She reached out, dragging her knuckle beneath your eye to rid of any stray tears. You smiled at the gesture, gaining one from her, too.

“You’re right, though.” You blinked away your feelings, taking her hand and leading her to your room so you could sit on the bed together. There was a brief, awkward silence. “What… Uh, what happened? How did it get to this?” You asked as you released her hand, playing with your own to distract yourself.

Abby swallowed, pursing her lips. She had a feeling you’d judge her for what she did, but she wasn't going to lie. “Joel… The way we— I killed him. Tortured him in front of his brother, and killed him in front of that girl; the one he killed everyone to save. She came after us. Went through all of our friends to get to me, and… let me go.” You couldn’t tell how she felt about being left alive, but you were glad she was, placing your hand back on hers for added comfort. “Don’t.” She went to pull her hand away, but you grabbed it with both of yours. “You can be upset with me—“

“I’m not.” You shook your head, holding her hand gently. “I never should’ve given you that lead. I’m sorry.”

“I would’ve found out eventually.” She shook her head. “And I still would’ve done it…” She grimaced. “And this all would’ve happened anyway.”

“There’s no point in blaming yourself,” you sighed. “You just have to—“

“Let go? Yeah… I’ve heard that,” she scoffed, giving your hand a squeeze before she let go. “Couldn’t do it before either.”

“I wasn’t going to say that, Abby.” You shook your head at her. “You just have to accept it. It probably won’t ‘get better,’ and you’ll probably never let go, but you’ll be able to move on with your life, and not feel guilty for that. Then eventually, you’ll start to remember happier things about them, and… you’ll accept it.”

“Is that what you did? Just accept it?” Her lip sneered when she asked the question, but her brows were bent upward with a contradictory emotion.

“I wanted to go back—“

“Why didn’t you?” She asked quickly, eyes rimming red just as quickly and making you avert your gaze.

“I couldn’t…” You shrugged, forcing that same flippancy you gave Mel and Nora. “I mean… I left like a fucking coward, Ab,” you laughed at yourself. “Going back? I’d feel like a complete fool. I couldn’t face you guys— I couldn’t even face you guys four years later. The only thing I could do was keep going and try not to fucking die, I don’t know.”

“Everyone wanted you back,” she muttered, now understanding the brief encounter you had months ago.

“I didn’t think you did.” Abby frowned, the words sounding like you were singling her out. “I thought, I don’t know, even if everyone else wanted me to be there, you wouldn’t after I suggested something so stupid.”

“It wasn’t stupid,” she said, chuckling lightly at your tone.

“It was insensitive.”

She shrugged. “I didn’t care… I didn’t even think of that, I just—“ She shook her head, sighing. “The first thing I thought when you mentioned it was that you were going to leave… I wanted to make it my choice that we wouldn’t see each other again, so I said something stupid— but if I’d just waited, let you talk, then… I would’ve realized you wanted to go together. Everyone just thought you planned on going alone.” She pursed her lips, looking away. “It was my fault everyone responded like that— don’t say it wasn’t,” she said before you could object. “No one would’ve said anything if I didn’t.”

“I didn’t care that much about what everyone else said. I figured they just thought I was going to leave you all, but… I thought you were telling me to leave for bringing it up in the first place.” You lied back on the bed so Abby wouldn’t see your face. “Even still, when I was alone, fucking terrified, the only thing I could think of was whether or not you guys were okay; how, maybe, it was better that I wasn’t there… It seemed like you guys got even closer when I saw you.”

There was a brief pause as Abby looked down at you. Clearly, you both needed to have this conversation, but it was almost impossible to have with how hard it was to sort out either of your feelings.

“The first thing I wanted to do when I realized you were gone,” she started slowly, “was go and find you; tell you that I don’t care, and if that’s what you wanted we could go. We could go to Los Angeles, or Santa Barbara, or San Francisco, or wherever the fuck you wanted to go, ‘cause I had no fucking idea what I was going to do without you… And I needed you.” The waver in her voice made you shut your eyes, taking in her words with a crease between your brows and a frown tugging at your lips. “I fucking needed you, and I just wanted to be with you, and I was scared, so I snapped at you thinking— I don’t know what I was thinking… Maybe-maybe if you knew we wouldn’t be together, then you wouldn’t go? Fuck, I just wanted you to stay with me,” she was rambling, words quick and spilling out until she caught herself, “and everyone else. Where you were safe. Where we were all safe. Together. I didn't mean to push you away.”

You had no idea what to say, staring up at the ceiling with a frown as your eyes shone beneath the warm light. You were quiet, voice small as if you knew just how wrong you were now. “I just wanted you happy,” you mumbled, hardly confident in what you used to think to yourself to justify your actions.

“Without you?” She scoffed at you. “Really?”

You shrugged, now thinking of anything that could back you up. “You had Owen.”

There was a moment of pause before Abby laughed, grabbing your pillow and hitting you with it. “Fuck you.”

“What?!” You laughed, pushing the pillow away and covering your face as she threw it at you. “You… loved him, or whatever,” you waved off, unable to hide the disdain in your voice.

“That’s what. You never liked us together.” You shrugged. “Why?”

You looked over at her, looking her up and down. “I don’t know.” You moved to sit up, huffing as you did and covering it with an exaggerated sigh. “You were my person.” There was a faint upward pull to her lips at that, but it fell quickly when she replayed the sentence in her head. She was your person, and you had stayed hers. After all those years; years of having your picture in her room or pocket, you had stayed close to her heart, but now she was nothing more than an old friend to you. “What?” You asked when you noticed her expression, reaching out and placing a hand on her thigh.

She swallowed, looking down at your hand. “Did you— Did you ever…” She stumbled over her words as she stared at your hand on her, eventually looking away. “Think about us? Any of us? I mean, you, Mel, and Nora were so close…”

You waited for her to finish, but that seemed to be the end of her sentence, so you stood. You went to your dresser, hand on your lower stomach as you grimaced but made sure to hide it from Abby. You grabbed an old jewelry box, taking it in unsteady hands and carrying it back to the bed where you set it down. Around your neck, there was a leather necklace you untied and pulled from your shirt, taking the key at the end of it and unlocking the box.

There was an old tape recorder inside. Headphones and car keys too, and a stack of photos among other trinkets.

Abby looked shocked, looking at you before reaching for the box when you nodded. The car keys, from the first time her dad taught you to drive, were tied to an old coin he’d gifted you. They were on top of an old photo of you and him in his greenhouse.

Her hands went for the other photos, looking through them and seeing how many there were of her or the two of you. You had more of your friends than you did with them; some of these photos she’d never seen before and making her brows pull together as she smiled somberly.

“When I was in Washington,” you spoke up quietly, looking at the pictures as Abby went through them. “Leah was on patrol when my group was leaving. I didn’t have many pictures of us together, so she gave me most of those… I guess she just had them with her.”

Abby smiled faintly. “She kept pictures of us with her all the time.” Her smile then fell again. “I thought you guys left immediately?”

You pursed your lips. “I needed a little extra medical attention before we could leave. She found our hiding spot.” You quickly continued before she could question you. “So I told her about how I lost one of my only pictures of us and my other tape recordings, and she just gave them to me.”

“Of us?” She looked up at you and you nodded. Abby went into her pocket, fingers digging for a wrinkled piece of paper. “I don’t have the recording with me; it's in my room, but… ” she muttered, pulling out the photo and smoothing over the water damaged paper before she handed it to you. “It’s a little ruined.”

“You had this?!” You took it, looking down at the picture and feeling your eyes burn before you moved to hug her, arms squeezing around her shoulders. “You don’t know how bad I felt about losing this, Abby.”

Her hands found your hips, awkwardly pulling you into her before her arms went around your waist to comfort you with how emotional you were getting over one picture. “It’s okay,” she tried to soothe, hand running up and down your back. “I’m glad you lost it. I finally got to keep a picture of us,” she laughed awkwardly, leaning back against your bedframe with you still in her arms. She knew you were trying to hide your face from her, so she let you stay as you were. “I actually thought you just left it behind.”

“What?” You laughed, pulling back to frown at her. She smiled at your laugh, hands still resting on your waist in case you hugged her again.

“I found it by the fire after you left.” She shrugged. “It was with your MP3.”

“So, what? You laughed again. “You thought I was burning pictures?”

“I don’t know, maybe?” She laughed, releasing you as you sat next to her with an eye roll.

Usually, you’d lean into her, or rest your head on her shoulder when you sat next to her, but now things were so different that you couldn’t just bounce back into old habits.

Every touch, every word, every glance, it was all based on feeling; some feeling that was brought up by the past before that fleeting feeling passed too, and soon, Abby was starting to realize you’d become complete strangers to one another. You hardly understood each other anymore. You weren’t certain how the other would react, or reciprocate, you didn’t even know what could be said at times. Even if you could reminisce for hours, when it came to talking and being present, there was hardly anything you could do.

It left Abby forgetting your advice and wishing she could go back to do this all over again; forget about finding Joel first and just find you. Or just go with you to California and spend the years like you did. No matter how much she wanted to go find him. No matter how much she would have regretted it.

At least you wouldn’t be a stranger to her.

Though, she had no idea how those years were for you. She didn’t know the hell you’d gone through, or the sleepless nights. No matter how much you told her that night, you didn’t tell her how you made yourself sick with guilt to the point that you had to lock all of your keepsakes away. Especially because you thought you’d lost one. She didn’t know how hard you worked to accept everything that happened, how seeing them after four years caused a rift between you and your squad to the point that they were telling you just to stay in Washington, how her showing up completely threw you off guard.

But maybe that was for the best.

Because that night, while she was wide awake, thinking of how she could find a way to know you again, you slept soundly. Sleeping through the night for once as you lied with the picture Abby left with you under your pillow.

The next morning, Abby came to the greenhouse. You smiled when you saw her, setting aside your plants to give her your full attention.

“Hey.” She smiled. “I’m going on my first patrol—“

“Already?” Your worried tone made her chuckle. “Ab, you’re still recovering.“

“I know, but I need to get back out there. I’ll go crazy if I don’t.” You grimaced, crossing your arms. “I was wondering if you’d go with me? It’s just around the island, so no combat.” You narrowed your eyes, wondering why she’d bring that up. “It’ll be quick,” she continued to try and persuade you.

“I don’t go on patrols anymore,” you told her, replacing your questioning glare with a sympathetic smile. “Sorry.”

“Oh…” She didn't ask why, just nodded before reaching into her pocket. “Okay, well, I brought this with me to give back to you—“

“No, no, no. Keep it.” You took her photo out of your pocket and handed it over. “I’m sure you’ve realized these go together now. You’ve had them for years. Please.”

The way you spoke to her, so cordially it seemed formal, made her feel uncomfortable in a way she couldn’t describe. She gladly kept the items, thankful you hadn’t, but also wishing you at least seemed to want them.

“Maybe…” You looked around, all of your morning duties done for now. “Maybe I could go with you just this once,” you suggested upon seeing the look on her face.

But she didn’t want you to placate her.

“That’s alright.”

“You sure?” You frowned at the sudden change in tune.

“I’m sure there’s a reason you don’t go anymore.” She gave you a smile and you nodded.

After that day, you didn’t speak much. Lev would come for lessons, and Abby would have to get him sometimes, but slowly, she just faded into another one of your comrades; people you knew but had no relationship with. People who hardly crossed your mind on a day-to-day basis.

She overheard you with one you were closer to— one of your new friends.

“So,” she started, “you know that new girl?” She asked as Abby passed by the greenhouse on her way out to patrol. She planned to get a pouch from you, but paused to eavesdrop. “I heard she’s from Salt Lake.”

You’d hummed. “We grew up together… But I don’t really know her anymore,” you’d admitted quietly, solemn.

Your friend huffed a laugh. “You’re so dramatic. What’s that supposed to mean, huh?”

You chuckled. “I dunno, just… Ya know, when I did know her, she was the best person I ever met. So gentle… kind. She had a way with animals— people, too. I don’t know, she was always so perfect to me when we were younger. I probably had a little crush on her or something.” Your friend cooed at you. “But as we grew up, we were, just, so close. Her dad just took me in like family after mine was… taken.” She could hear your voice falter. “But when he was killed, things changed… Remember that tip I gave in Washington? ‘Bout Tommy.” Your friend hummed. “His brother, Joel. He was the one to kill him, and Abby… She beat him to death. In front of his brother… In front of his kid.”

She could hear the way you struggled to get the words out, biting her inner cheek. She wanted to leave, but she also wanted to know what else you’d say, waiting for you to continue.

“And I don’t even blame her. It makes me sick, but I don’t blame her ‘cause if I ever found out who destroyed my family?” Your voice darkened. “I’d do so much worse.”

“No need to justify to me,” your friend huffed, humming in agreement. “I know exactly what you mean.”

There was a pause before you spoke again “And sometimes, I wish I’d been there to see it through. To know that he’s actually dead… Or, even just to be there for her— ‘cause the girl that I knew? She never could’ve done that. I never would’ve let her get to that point; feel that way? Hurt that much but… I left her.” Your friend tried to speak over you, but you stopped her. “So, I can’t help but feel at fault for what happened to our friends. I don’t know anyone who would still want to care about me after what I did. So, I just feel like I don’t know her anymore. I can’t understand her at all.”

Abby thought of talking to you that night, telling you she overheard the conversation, but she couldn’t bring herself to face you knowing how guilty you felt.

What if seeing her made you feel worse? Talking to her made you feel sick? She’d spent all these years feeling guilty, only to find out you felt the same— and now even more so because you knew how she ended up here. Like this.

She could say the same thing about you. She thought you were perfect when you were younger, she wanted to protect you as you got older, and she felt like she failed you now. Like it was her fault you felt this way. She could say the exact same things you did, which was why she kept her distance and waited for you to come to her.

She waited.

And waited.

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