#but if it's only in this specific context

[darkmatilda]

𝐩𝐢𝐜𝐤 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐩𝐨𝐢𝐬𝐨𝐧 | 𝐬.𝐫𝐞𝐢𝐝

𝐬𝐮𝐦𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐲: when spencer was dealing with a migraine, he definitely preferred staying home with a good book or just going to sleep. but after losing a bet to morgan, he couldn't escape—he had to show up for a blind date.

𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬/𝐩𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐭𝐰: spencer reid (s6-7) x diva/bombshell!female reader, spencer's pov, alcohol consumption, suggestive content comes back in flashbacks, scratch marks.

𝐚/𝐧: okay, question for you — what kind of bet could spencer possibly lose to morgan?

𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐝𝐬: 6.5k

Spencer could offer anyone one piece of advice.

If, at any point during your— let’s face it, pathetically short — lifespan (the average human life expectancy is approximately 73 years, though this varies depending on environmental factors, lifestyle choices, genetics, and a laundry list of other variables you probably skimmed past in some middle school biology textbook) you ever get the idea to make a bet with a man like Derek Morgan, stop yourself immediately.

Seriously.

Tuck your pride deep into your pocket, crumple up your honor like a piece of paper, and toss it straight into the trash. Not every moment of your life has to be spent proving to the world that you’re always right. Especially when there’s even the slightest chance you might not be. Save yourself the humiliation.

You could spend this Friday night at home, nose buried in a book, instead of perched on a stool in some dimly lit, cramped bar, the kind where you keep glancing over your shoulder, half expecting someone to jump out and stab you in the ribs. Okay, maybe that’s dramatic. Spencer just really didn’t want to be there.

On this date. This blind date.

This blind date with some friend of Morgan’s whom he had never seen before, didn’t know what she looked like, what her name was, or what she did for a living…he knew nothing about her. And that, among other things, made him feel like the meeting could only go terribly.

The second reason was his migraine, which decided to strike that day, bringing that awful pressure back to his temples and turning him into a snappy, irritable jerk. The third reason was that his date was already twenty minutes late. How could he expect to spend meaningful time with someone who didn’t even respect him enough to show up on time?

At least he was in a relatively quiet bar instead of some nightclub bursting with lights. He probably wouldn’t have survived that. At least here, he could lean his elbow against the bar and press the cold glass of his drink to his temple, hoping it might soothe the awful sensation pounding in his head. He had specifically asked for the drink to be served with as much ice as possible.

He glanced at his watch. Twenty-three minutes and forty-seven seconds...

Someone slid onto a barstool. Not right next to him—there was one empty seat between them. Spencer cast a fleeting glance at the woman and almost snorted. That definitely wasn’t her.

Sure, he didn’t know what she looked like, and she didn’t know what he looked like. But Morgan wouldn’t have set him up with…someone like that. He wouldn’t be that cruel.

This woman looked as if someone had just fallen to their knees in front of her, begged her to step out of the pages of a high-fashion magazine, and graced the room with her presence. Or like the kind of person you stumble across while flipping through profiles of major mob bosses on Garcia’s computer and click on the tab labeled wife. Calling her pretty in this context would have been the greatest insult, a blatant lie, and a complete disregard for her actual presence.

No one in their right mind would have set someone like him up with a woman like this. An average-looking brainiac, often losing his train of thought and completely getting lost in his own words. Awkward. Currently also irritated and exhausted, but that’s beside the point.

Besides, the woman didn’t look like she was waiting for her date to show up. She sat facing the bar, not looking around, not scanning for anyone with her eyes. In fact, her gaze was fixed on one spot. On her phone, which she kept tapping on with her long nails. It couldn’t be her.

However, there was no other woman in sight. So, his date was already thirty minutes and twelve seconds late…wait, hold on. Had he really been staring at her for six seconds and twenty-five minutes? That was almost creepy. He was really being strange that day.

He shook his head in pity at himself and…still waited.

And waited.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her adjust herself in her seat. Her posture straight as an arrow, her thighs widening from the pressure on the seat. Long fingers with long nails, incessantly clicking away on her phone. Her jaw slightly clenched. What could be so important that she was completely ignoring the world around her? Some exciting gossip from her best friend? Or maybe when you look like that, you simply stop paying attention to your surroundings because it doesn’t deserve it? Or perhaps he was just projecting the irritation he had built up onto a woman who hadn’t done anything to him, creating degrading assumptions about her based solely on her appearance?

He placed the untouched glass with his drink on the counter. The ice clinked. Since he’d already wasted so much time preparing and leaving his apartment, it would be foolish to waste it even further without saying a word to his, well, potential date? Besides, he already felt humiliated. Why not embarrass himself even more?

"Hey," he said, fixing his gaze on her again. Damn, his voice sounded weak. She didn’t even flinch, probably hadn’t heard him. He cleared his throat and restrained himself from rolling his eyes. Of course, she hadn’t heard, she was too absorbed in her phone. "Hey, are you…are you maybe Morgan’s friend?"

Without rushing, she finished typing a message on her phone, then rested her chin on her hand, stretching her long fingers over it. Spencer tried to decipher what that unfazed look in her eyes meant. Boredom? Disdain?

"Spencer Reid," she said after a moment, nodding almost imperceptibly to herself. Her gaze drifted over his figure, leaving behind the faint trace of something—some kind of shiver—that he worked hard to ignore. He preferred to focus on something else. She knew his name, but he didn’t know hers? “I was starting to think you wouldn’t speak up.”

He frowned, and an unidentifiable sound escaped his throat. Somewhere between a startled sigh and a derisive scoff.

“You knew it was me?” he asked, immediately regretting the stupid question. She had just made it blatantly obvious! For reasons he couldn’t quite grasp, he felt as though there was a strict limit to the number of sentences he was allowed to exchange with her. And he’d just wasted one of them. “So why didn’t you say something first?”

She wasn’t looking at him anymore. She was tapping something else into her phone. He rolled his eyes, not even bothering to hide it. After all, she wasn’t paying attention to him anyway.

“I saw that,” she said, still not looking at him. “It’s rude to make faces behind someone’s back.”

Spencer had this particular trait: he was quick to form opinions about people. His job, after all, involved noticing patterns in others’ personalities and using that to predict their next moves. This time, though, he abandoned the idea of a deep psychoanalysis and focused on one simple thing.

Her insolence just plain pissed him off.

To the extent that, instead of getting up from his seat and leaving the bar with a sarcastic thanks for the date, he slid off his stool and onto the one that had been separating them. His drink stayed in its original spot. Not that it was doing anything for his headache, anyway.

“It’s also rude to be late for an agreed-upon meeting time and ignore the other person in favor of your phone,” he shot back, this time without a hint of hesitation.

Either he imagined it, or a brief tremor took control of the corners of her lips.

She turned off her phone and placed her hand over it, as if to show that while she wasn’t using it at the moment, she could always pick it back up whenever she felt like it. Once this fleeting interest in him had run its course. It was like throwing down a challenge to the court jester. Entertain me.

“You’re right,” she admitted, without a trace of remorse. “It is rude.”

For a moment, they just stared at each other in complete silence. He tried not to swallow at all, even though saliva was pooling in his mouth. She seemed like an incredible observer, the type who would notice the slow, too-slow movement of his throat if he dared to let it happen. He had no idea what to say. No clue why he’d even joined her, why he was prolonging this conversation. He felt that if he spoke first, he’d seal his defeat in this interaction.

Not that he wasn’t already standing on that losing ground. And though he couldn’t believe he was actually saying it, sitting under her gaze was somehow worse than the potential humiliation. He cleared his throat.

“Morgan set us up,” he said.

“A blind date.”

“You lose a bet, too?”

She laughed. With that slight raise of her brow, it seemed like a genuine reaction. To his surprise, Spencer regretted his words. Maybe he shouldn’t have admitted to the woman he was on a date with that this was just the result of a wager. No matter how brazen or mean she might have been.

“Don’t worry,” she said, catching the look on his face. “It’s new. A completely exciting novelty, really. To be on a date with a guy and know he’s only there because he has to be. Not because he just wants to fuck you.”

Spencer shifted slightly in his seat. Once again, she was putting him in a position where he had no idea how to respond. For a moment, she watched him, her gaze piercing, her lips slightly parted to reveal hints of her teeth. But when he hesitated too long to say anything, she turned back to her phone. He’d lost her attention. Not that he particularly cared to keep it. Well, maybe he cared a little, but not in the most obvious sense. He saw it more as a game, a test of who she was.

She might not have been the most pleasant type of woman, but there was something undeniably fascinating about her. With that appearance, with that magnetic aura, she had to be used to crowds of men trailing after her, trying to impress her. He wondered how long it would take before she completely stopped paying him any attention. How susceptible to boredom she really was.

In the meantime, he let out a quiet sigh, turning to retrieve the drink he’d left at his previous spot. When he returned to his seat, however, he nearly spilled it on himself. She had shifted. Where before she had been angled toward the bar, only glancing at him sideways over her shoulder, now she was directly facing him, her knees nearly brushing his. She was entirely exposed to his gaze.

Earlier, Spencer had mostly registered the aura she projected—commanding, cool, utterly detached. Her beauty was breathtaking, but it had felt... out of reach. Untouchable. Now, up close, with more time to truly look at her, she became tangible. A shape—every curve and detail of her figure. Her lips, which, despite the sharp-edged words they formed, looked incredibly soft in texture.

He felt a bit pathetic for the fact that the first two things he noticed were her figure and her lips. But, in his defense, he’d already dissected everything else about her earlier.

“Sorry,” she said, breaking into his thoughts. She gestured vaguely toward her phone, the motion dismissive. “People won’t stop bothering me. My subjects.”

She uttered the word with a hint of sarcasm, her face lighting up as if she were joking, but considering her earlier behavior, Spencer found it genuinely difficult to tell whether she was serious about calling them that.

His mind should have been focused on sorting through the information, filing it neatly into the overstuffed yet impeccably organized shelves of his thoughts. He should have added the detail about her being someone’s boss to the appropriate folder, then used it as a springboard for conversation. After all, he didn’t know a single meaningful thing about her yet.

But instead, he was far too preoccupied with staring at her exposed knee like some pathetic fool.

Another second of silence, and she’d stop looking at him again—he’d already learned that pattern. He didn’t hold back and let out a short laugh.

“What’s so funny?” she asked, raising an eyebrow.

“Nothing,” he mumbled, shaking his head. But then he added, “Do you call your employees subjects? Like you’re, I don’t know, Catherine the Great on the Russian throne?”

“I knew you’d latch onto that. Just didn’t think you’d compare me to her.”

“Were you hoping for Cleopatra?”

The sound of her laughter caught the attention of the men at the table in the corner of the bar. Spencer wouldn't have been surprised if one of them approached her right then, completely ignoring his presence. Her head tilted slightly back, exposing her neck. He hurriedly took a sip of his drink, hoping the alcohol would dull his perception and stop him from paying such religious attention to such details. At that moment, he wasn't sitting there because of the lost bet. He was there because the chair physically had a grip on him.

“You’re cute,” she said.

Another surprising choice of words. A buzz filled his head, possibly a mix of his migraine and alcohol, or maybe something else entirely.

"Weren’t you supposed to say funny?" he muttered.

"I know what I wanted to say. I’ve never been on a date where someone compared me to two such powerful women."

He felt strangely pleased, and tried to push that feeling away as far as he could. She’d said one nice thing, and he was forgetting about the rest.

"But once, I was called the leader of a group of real angels," she added almost immediately, glancing at him with a small smirk. "So you could always try harder."

So many potential sarcastic replies flashed through his mind that he ended up saying nothing at all. Their knees were touching now. When did that happen? There had been a few inches of space between them earlier. Had he moved closer to her, or had she moved closer to him?

He considered pulling back, but that would have been an admission—both to her and to himself—that her touch was making it harder for him to think clearly. And after all, one of the defining traits of Spencer Reid was that nothing could cloud his intellect.

"Well, considering how biblically accurate angels look, I’m not sure if that was a compliment," his lips answered for him, without much consultation with his brain. They consulted instead with the center of humiliation, and received its approval.

Her eyebrows rose again as she slightly leaned toward him.

"Are you saying it was an insult?"

Being this close, she didn’t even need to raise her voice. Her words barely brushed the air, yet they were still audible. She was preventing him from interrupting her. How could he do that when he was barely able to come up with anything reasonable?

Without taking his eyes off her, he reached for his drink. The glass appeared between them, becoming an object that separated them, allowing him to—what a paradox—clear his thoughts for just a moment. He took a slow, tiny sip.

"Maybe the guy had good intentions," he replied with a feigned, dismissive shrug. "It’s just that his execution kinda gave him away. What I’m saying is, you should appreciate my compliment more." A bit of the drink remained on his lower lip, which reflected in her eye when she turned her gaze toward it. Spencer felt like he was on some kind of roller coaster, speeding in an unknown, slightly dangerous direction, not knowing how to stop it. Did he even want to stop it? He definitely needed to slow it down somehow. Before it crashed. He inhaled deeply, thinking of something that could, if only for a moment, give him control over the conversation. "Although maybe it shouldn’t even count, since this isn’t a real date."

"A compliment is a compliment. By the way, in your case, it was the other way around. The execution turned out well. The intentions, not so much. You didn’t want to make me feel good, right?" She tilted her head slightly to the side, curling the end of her sentence.

"I’ll leave that up to your interpretation," he replied after a moment. He was staring at her so intently that he almost unconsciously copied her movement. Control over the conversation, yeah, right! It was a struggle to swallow. "Does...does this not bother you at all? That this isn’t a real date?"

Constantly reminding her of that fact felt like clutching a damn sharp razor while drowning.

Her short huff synchronized with a roll of her eyes, a flash of white.

"I’m devastated by that fact," she groaned theatrically, tapping him seriously on the knee for dramatic effect. A shiver ran from his leg all the way through his body, the glass trembled in his hands. "I’m falling apart, I swear. Will you let me rest my head on your shoulder so I can cry?"

She looked at him from under lowered lashes, pretending to beg. Spencer was finding it increasingly hard to resist the buzz in his head and the thoughts that often wandered in strange directions. The tips of her long nails were still brushing against his leg through the fabric of his pants.

"Sarcasm," he muttered, struggling to tear his gaze away from them. Struggling to breathe. "How original.”

"I know this isn’t a real date, you don’t have to keep reminding me, Mr. Grumpy," she said, ignoring his mumbling remark that didn’t really mean anything. "By the way, even if it wasn’t obvious that this was a lost bet, I would’ve figured it out right away. All it took was one look at you when I walked in."

For a moment, Spencer managed to ground his feet in the reality beneath him. He furrowed his brows.

"What do you mean?"

She made some gesture with her hand.

"You were sitting here like you were being punished. Head down. Irritated look. Posture suggesting people shouldn’t approach you." She tried to demonstrate, slumping her previously perfectly straight back. It looked incredibly unnatural on her. "I’m so glad Morgan invited me here instead of some sweet, affectionate girl. She would’ve run away crying."

"That...is not true," he blurted out, shaking his head. "Okay, I admit, I didn’t want to be here, but I definitely didn’t suggest people should stay away from me."

"Maybe not you," she shrugged. "But your body language did."

He snorted.

"Look who’s the expert in reading body language."

“So now you want to be here?"

"What?"

"You said you didn’t want to be here. So, do you want to be here now?"

With some refined calmness, she followed his face. Their knees were almost touching, one of her legs was practically between his. Their bodies were facing each other, heads leaning toward one another. A glass in his hand. He tightened his grip on it, slightly pulling his shoulder blades together. He tried to escape the sphere of her scent, her gaze, her overpowering presence, which he was still relentlessly sinking deeper into. He couldn’t stay in that separation for long and soon returned to his previous position, placing them closer than ever before. Something in her eyes flashed with challenge.

"Apparently, you know a lot about body language," he said slowly, watching the flash in her eyes with the same breath. Surprisingly, he sounded quite confident. "Won’t you figure it out yourself?"

She hadn’t blinked for so long, yet her eyelids didn’t even flutter. After his question, there was a moment of silence, during which the corners of her lips curled up progressively. During this relatively short meeting, he’d barely seen a smile on her face, and none of them were like this one. In its way, it was ruthless, victorious, in its way cruel, in its way addictive.  It made him want to take some kind of action, to tear it off her face in a radical way.

He felt the drink slipping from his hands. For a moment, he was afraid he’d lost control over his limbs, and it would fall to the floor. But soon it dawned on him that her fingers were slowly beginning to wrap around the glass. Slowly, but surely, she took it from him.

"I could," she admitted, taking a sip. Spencer stared at the movement of her lips as they slowly embraced the glass, leaving their mark on it. "But why should I bother when you can tell me yourself?" she asked. She tilted her head slightly, and the next statement that came from her mouth was almost amused. "I don’t chase."

In the silence that fell, he felt as though she was listening, in some wicked way, to the sound of his heart beating. Like in some movie, where the world around fades into insignificance, other sounds melting into the atmosphere.

It seemed to Spencer that his voice had caught in his throat in some defensive gesture, trying to stop him from responding before properly considering his words. At the same time, so many sentences rushed to his lips—not just those that made sense. His mind was veiled by a black curtain of unbreathable fabric. In that moment, he could’ve just as easily recited the formula for the sum of an arithmetic sequence.

He swallowed hard.

"I don’t chase either," he finally replied, not breaking their gaze.

For a moment, she continued to stare at him. Her expression unreadable, the smile long forgotten. She shifted the glass in her hand, then tilted it to her lips, drinking the rest of its contents in one go. She set it down on the counter again, with force.

"Fuck you, then," she said indifferently.

For a moment, Spencer had no idea how to react; he couldn’t process it. His jaw slightly dropped, but he had no words to follow. And before he could add anything, she simply stood up from her seat, effortlessly untangling herself from their complex positioning, then walked away.

He sat there for what felt like an eternity, unmoving, until he was finally forced to take a breath. It was only with that rush of air into his lungs that he was able to somehow, in a distorted way, begin to rationalize everything.

First, he felt strangely disappointed.

Then, he found himself swept up in a wave of ordinary irritation towards her. The same kind of irritation he'd felt at the beginning of their conversation, which had subtly slipped out through the back door as the talk continued. And now, it had returned with double the force. He remembered her face, and when he imagined looking into those eyes, all he saw was the grotesque expansion of her inflated ego.

In its own way, it was justified. She was damn attractive, unattainable. Some level of excessive self-admiration was almost natural for her. At least, not surprising. That didn’t make it any less frustrating.

Spencer rubbed his eyelids as if waking from some dream. And then he saw it. Her phone on the bar. Left behind by her.

And although he grabbed the phone and even turned his body toward the door, he hesitated for a long time, unsure if he should follow her. She’d practically ignored him during the first few minutes of their conversation, absorbed by that very phone. On the other hand, it was supposedly some business matter. On yet another hand, he didn’t care in the slightest. When he left the bar, it wasn’t out of some deeply ingrained sense of altruism. He did it because his legs demanded it. His subconscious. The blood pulsing in his temples and the rapid breaths nervously coursing between his nose and mouth.

He stopped outside the bar, surrounded by the nighttime quiet. A yellow cab zipped past him, so close he could feel the air ripple in its wake, as he wondered which direction she might have gone. How was it even possible that she’d vanished so quickly? For a moment, he stood there, feeling a growing sense of pity for himself. He slowed his breathing, as though that might help him catch the faint sound of her heels striking the pavement somewhere in the distance. He wanted to hear it.

His grip tightened on the phone as he turned back toward the bar. He’d leave it there, hand it over to the bartender, and then go home. She’d figure it out eventually, realize where she’d last used it, and return.

But just as he took a single step, he noticed a silhouette leaning casually against the building.

Watching him. And smiling with triumph.

*

"Once again, why exactly are we, profilers, being called in for a contaminated water case?" Spencer asked, clearly frustrated with himself.

He couldn't focus. And he was hungover. Well, no, he wasn’t. He’d had less than one drink two days ago on Friday night, and now it was the start of the week, and he was at work. He’d gotten a decent amount of sleep last night, had an excellent coffee, and even eaten breakfast. So why did he still feel like there was some dull, persistent throbbing buried deep in the recesses of his skull?

The entire team stared at him for a beat too long in silence.

"This is the third such incident in the past two months," Hotch finally spoke, his tone patient. "The first time, a chemical contaminant got into the water supply of a small town, causing mild poisoning symptoms in a handful of people. The second incident was nearly identical, except more people were affected. The third time, it happened in a different, more populated area, using a much more lethal toxin. And now, we have fatalities."

For a moment, Spencer stayed silent, processing the information. In front of him lay a case file, its contents neatly compiled. He focused his gaze on the first page, his expression thoughtful. But as he read the words, they seemed to blur together, offering little clarity and yielding no significant conclusions. A bitter urge to scoff at his own incompetence bubbled up within him. He was distracted.

“You forgot to mention this is a top, top, top-secret case,” Rossi chimed in, breaking the silence.

Spencer furrowed his brow. Was there a hint of irony in Rossi’s tone, or was he imagining it?

“Sorry, man, but what planet have you been on for the past thirty minutes while we were going over this?” Morgan asked, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms behind his head, his tone light but teasing.

He tried to avoid his gaze. He had this strange feeling that Morgan could see right through him. After all, he was the only one who knew about his date. Well, in theory. The details and the outcome were still unknown to him, and they were meant to remain that way.

“There’s suspicion that all these contaminations are the work of one person or organization,” JJ spoke up, glancing at him from the corner of her eye with some pity. Not mockery, it’s worth specifying. “They’re testing the effects of various poisons, their toxicity, as well as gathering data on the response times of emergency services, procedures, and residents' reactions. And that, in turn, could mean…”

“Mass panic,” Prentiss finished.

JJ nodded at her, agreeing.

Thanks to this explanation, everything began to slowly form in his mind. Another case shrouded in secrecy, meant to be kept hidden from literally everyone, starting with the public, and even ending with other agencies.

“We’ll meet at the jet in fifteen minutes,” Hotch informed them, standing up from his chair. “We have a field interview to conduct. A chemist will join us to collect samples of the poison.”

Spencer dragged himself up from his seat, but before he could follow the others out of the room, Morgan stopped him with a gesture.

"You're staying, man. We need to talk." He crossed his arms over his chest, his expression full of curiosity.

Spencer sighed.

"Hotch said—"

"Fifteen minutes, if I heard right."

"Well, fifteen minutes is more than enough time for someone to drink contaminated water and end up six feet under."

"The water system's been shut off, so slow down with the doom and gloom. Besides, this conversation wouldn’t be happening if you’d called me back over the weekend," Morgan said, his tone firm but without any real anger—just pure, friendly curiosity. A grin spread across his face. "So, how was it? Did you have a good time? Did you like my friend?"

He knew that question was coming, yet he hadn’t prepared for it. He had no idea how to answer, no clue how to summarize an encounter that had somehow lodged itself so deeply in the recesses of his mind. It kept surfacing, unbidden, pushing certain images into his vision—and sensations into his awareness.

Spencer hit the doorframe with his shoulder.

Or maybe it was her? Either way, there was a sound of impact, one of them must have collided with something on the way. The way they both traveled, immersed in each other's faces, bodies heading out on a trip despite the layers of clothes separating them.

It was probably him after all. It was from his mouth that this short, sharp sound escaped. It didn't take them long to cover the distance between the bar and his apartment. They needed little conversation to shift from the topic left in the phone to the joining of impatient, curious lips. Curious whether they could once again tap into the tension created just moments earlier, when they sat across from each other on the bar stools.

And when the initial curiosity was satisfied, they couldn't stop. It was replaced by a need, driven out by the surging desire, as if they both had drunk a poison that clouded and darkened their minds.

How else could one explain that, despite barely knowing each other, going to bed together had suddenly become an unquestionable priority, one that didn’t concern such mundane things as doorframe or furniture?

Even now, his hand twitched as if instinctively reaching for his chest. Beneath his buttoned-up shirt and vest, his skin bore faint, fading marks that, while diminishing with each passing day, were still visible. Sometimes, they even felt tangible. When he thought about them long enough, he could almost feel the stinging sensation of sharp nails dragging across his body.

He shrugged slowly. Something he’d learned in the past few days—sometimes the best way to deflect was to redirect the question right back.

“Morgan, why did you set me up with her specifically?” he asked, his tone serious, genuine curiosity lacing his words. His friend furrowed his brows slightly in response.

“I mean, what was the goal here? I bet you have plenty of friends, but you chose her specifically,”

When he referred to her with that pronoun, it carried a weight of unspoken adjectives. Her. So attractive, so alluring. Confident to an intimidating degree, capable of making him feel like the most extraordinary man in the world and a complete nobody—all with a single glance.

Morgan didn’t get a chance to respond before Spencer continued, diving headfirst into what had consumed far too much of his thoughts lately.

“Did you hope I’d, I don’t know…embarrass myself in front of her?”

“Did you?” Morgan countered, his brow twitching upward. He quickly sobered, though, when he noticed Spencer’s serious expression.

“Listen, man. I don’t know why you’d think that. We’ve known each other a long time. She set me up with her friend once, so I figured she’d be open to it. Besides, I had a feeling you two would get along. She’s incredibly smart. I just wanted you to have a good time—you’ve been so…withdrawn lately.”

He felt a little guilty for snapping at him like that. After all, Derek could have used his lost bet for far more devious purposes instead of trying to give him a good evening. Spencer sighed, apologetically.

“Okay, sorry, I was just curious.”

He shifted uncomfortably, hoping this would be the end of the conversation.

“No harm done, man. But now spill—did you have a good time? Was it worth crawling out of your den? What did you two do? Stay in the bar the whole time, or did you end up taking her somewhere—or maybe she took you…”

“We…” Spencer hesitated, swallowing hard. He didn’t know why it was so difficult to admit it—especially to Derek, of all people. Maybe because casual, one-night encounters with people he barely knew had never been his thing. And this one��this one felt different. She lingered in his mind so vividly, and he was terrified that saying anything out loud might make her slip away, like a fragile dream dissipating at dawn.

“You are—”

His fists clenched from the feeling that lingered within him, a feeling so intense that he doubted he could physically find any outlet for it.

“I am, what?” she asked, her words a mere murmur between rapid, heavy, and loud breaths. But despite their softness and their blending with other sounds, she managed to imbue them with a tone of unmistakable assertiveness. 

Spencer couldn't respond, his forehead resting momentarily on her collarbones. He felt a shiver rising up his shoulders and then his entire back as the tips of her nails barely perceptibly sank into his hair. They gently glided through the strands until they tightened around them when a short, hiss-like moan broke out her lips.

"What, you won't even say it out loud?" she asked, sliding her fingers down his neck. The trail she marked caused his back to straighten, tension building from the delicate, burning sensation of her touch. "You were more willing to compliment me earlier. Or maybe you wanted to say I'm rude again—"

"You’re incredible," he interrupted her with a sudden exhale, lifting his head finally to meet her gaze. Her lower lip stayed slightly parted the whole time, and he couldn’t ignore the invitation, nor refrain from placing a chaotic, messy kiss on them. "And rude, but I feel you so well..."

She laughed into his mouth, which turned into a sudden, pleased sob when he accidentally bit part of her lower lip. 

"Sorry," he muttered instinctively, before it dawned on him what a wonderful sound had escaped her when he did it. Before it dawned on him that he wanted to hear it again.

She gently shook her head, as if in disbelief.

“You’re cute,” 

"Yeah, we stayed at the bar," he finished his thought, briefly rubbing his forehead. Lying was so incredibly stupid in this situation. She was Morgan's friend, for crying out loud. He’d undoubtedly ask her the same question, and she’d give an entirely different answer—because unlike him, she wasn’t an idiot afraid to admit they’d slept together. Where had his so-called brilliance gone? “And it was fine. It was a good night. And you’re right…she’s smart, interesting. We had a good conversation.”

If only he sounded believable. Derek’s eyebrows shot up, and for a moment, he stayed silent, watching Spencer intently.

“Well, I’m glad to hear that,” he said briefly. For a moment, they stood there, Spencer certain that Derek would say something else, waiting for it. But he just merely nodded toward the door.

“Okay, time for us, I guess. Before anyone decides to brew themselves a cup of tea, unaware of the special ingredient.”

Spencer watched him head toward the door.

“You said the water supply’s been shut down?”

“In small towns, you never really know.”

*

“I don’t want to say anything, but we should probably get going,” he started, glancing at his watch. The fifteen minutes that Hotch had mentioned were still firmly planted in his mind.

Even though Hotch stood right next to him, waiting as well. It was hard to tell if he was starting to feel impatience with his stoic expression.

Prentiss sighed, her hands resting on her hips. The rest of the team was already on the jet, with only the three of them left waiting for the arrival of the last passenger. The most crucial one for this case.

Spencer understood, though barely, that people could be late for personal reasons. But at work? That should always be a priority, to get there on time and do the job. His mind wandered back to when he’d been leaning over the bar, counting the minutes and seconds, with a cold drink in front of him…

“Is that her?”

He looked at Emily, unsure why there was such surprise in her voice. Then he glanced toward the person they’d been waiting for and asked himself why the universe seemed to enjoy playing tricks on him so much.

Of course, it was her.

Hotch, as the head of their team, extended his hand towards her. Her gaze never fell on Spencer, but not because she was avoiding him, rather because… she seemed lost in thought? Dressed in formal attire, just as striking as that evening, with a slightly furrowed brow and a less playful expression on her face.

“SSA Aaron Hotchner,” he introduced himself briefly, shaking her hand. Then, he gently shifted his gaze towards the two other members of his team. “Special Agent Emily Prentiss and…”

“Can someone explain to me why I couldn’t bring my team with me?” she asked in a firm tone, as always standing perfectly upright.

She looked at each of them in turn, this time not skipping over Spencer. But her face didn’t even twitch when their gazes met. Something that couldn’t be said about him.

Just to be clear, it wasn’t that he was staring at her like some lovesick puppy. After all, they shared only one night, not a twenty-something-year marriage. It was simply that reconciling such a twisted turn of events took him a moment. Her pretentious tone didn’t even irritate him that much. He was too busy staring at her face, comparing the sophisticated silhouette in the daylight to the one that stretched beneath him when the space around them was still consumed by the night.

He cleared his throat, trying to return to the present moment. And once he did, his lips almost spoke on their own.

“This is a matter that requires particular discretion,” he began to explain. He tried to adopt as neutral a tone as possible, but inside, a sense of amusement began to fill him. The whole situation was almost theatrical, as were their actions and glances. He analyzed her face, still unmoved, listening to his words with complete focus. Wow, she was definitely more professional than he was.

“We're dealing with contamination in the water supply. The information about this could cause widespread panic among the public, something we certainly want to avoid. That’s why you’ve been assigned to this task, and only you. Without your subjects.”

He saw it, that barely noticeable movement at the corners of her lips. When he caught it, a sense of euphoria surged through him. But it was quickly replaced by nerves, as it suddenly hit him that they'd be spending the entire day together. How should he talk to her? Should he treat it all like a regular day, as grown adults should, or pretend it never happened?

As the amusement faded from his face, hers seemed to double. Emily watched their expressions like a tennis match, glancing from one to the other. Hotch, as always, remained stoic, but it was likely that questions were swirling in his mind as well.

“Thank you very much for the clarification, Dr. Reid,” she responded with an overly polite tone, nodding at him as though granting him an honor. And, well, he couldn’t help but feel that deep down inside, that’s exactly how he felt when faced with her smile. “It’s good that you’re here to dispel any potential doubts this case may undoubtedly raise for me. I’m sure I’ll consult with you further. Now, I suppose we should get going.”

She said it as if she were the only boss in the entire operation, giving one last glance over all three of them before walking confidently toward the jet.

They were, more or less, confused.

Hotch was the first to shake himself out of it and followed her footsteps.

Prentiss slightly parted her lips, casting a look of full suspicion at him.

“Wait a second,” she began, pointing at him with a finger. “How did she know who you are, when Hotch didn’t have a chance to introduce you?”

He hesitated before answering, still watching the figure disappearing aboard the jet.

“I guess my scientific accomplishments have finally made me famous,” he replied flatly.

Spencer couldn't deny it. An incredibly interesting day was coming. 

taglist: @she-wont-miss @mggslover @nyeddleblog @dylanobrienswife0420 @wmoony

@heddgie @khxna @marauder-exe-old @yujyujj @charleyreid @kitty-kai @sp3ncelle @pleasantwitchgarden @beesin03 @misserabella @re1dsb1xch @trulymadlydarling @cynbx @penelopegarciaismygf

[secriden]

There's something so wondrously momentous about Style only saying his "I love you" now, when he realises that all the secrets he was keeping from Fadel are already laid bare.

He says this a significant time after Fadel has said his (and, in the context of the wider narrative, after Kant and Bison) and for the character we have seen as prone to glibness, exaggeration and flippancy with his words, that feels incredibly intentional.

Because this confession was the only truth Style had left to give.

Fadel is finally done playing his (poorly thought out) game, done with his (already cracking at the seams) charade, done with giving Style more opportunities to pull at his heartstrings with his earnestness lies.

Fadel is demanding the truth, and tells Style exactly what truth he wants to hear.

And the thing is, there is truth in this: Style's motivations at the start were wrapped up in a deception specifically targeting Fadel.

I know we, as a fandom, harp on about Style "doing all that for a car", but something I would like us all to revisit is what Kant actually says to Style when he first asks Style to "hit on" Fadel:

Kant: You need to help me. You know I don't usually feel this way about someone. And then shortly later, after Style refuses: Kant: Hey, hold on. (Kant grabs Style's hand.) What do I have to do to for you to help me out? Should I pay you?

(Please forgive my inability to gif and watch Style's reaction to this.) Style is visibly surprised and intrigued. Kant seems to be serious about this request, and I think Style decides to test just how important it is to Kant by asking for the one thing he knows Kant will not give up.

Just look the expressions on Style's face. We didn't have the context of knowing Style back then as well as we do now, but this is the look Style gets when he's throwing out a challenge (to Fadel), when he's trying to ferret out some new insight (from Fadel), when he wants to see how someone (Fadel) will react to whatever outlandish (provocative) thing he's said or done.

And when Kant agrees, Style even checks again if Kant is serious about going through with it -- and it's this that convinces Style of the sincerity of Kant's request.

Yes, the car was a factor, and yes Style also wanted revenge and to humble Fadel, but at the centre of Style's motivation has always been a plea for help from a friend.

In episode 1: Kant: Under one condition. You have to make him head over heels in love with you. Style: I'll do it. Not just for the car, but someone like him needs to be humbled by someone like me.

But in agreeing to help Kant, Style really was damning Fadel to play the fool because Fadel's feelings (his heart) was a commodity that Style was fully willing to play with back then.

And there are aspects of truth here too. When Kant tells Style about Fadel (and Bison) being hitmen, Style decides he's done and wants out. Kant reasons that it's more dangerous for Style to break up with Fadel now, because it would look suspicious, but crucially this isn't enough to convince Style.

So Kant, once again, makes the plea to friendship and to his need for Style specifically, and it is this that causes Style to finally cave.

But in doing so, the things that Style agrees to are:

Kant: Work with me. Help me get more information about them. Once we get that, it's done. Captain puts them in jail, and we walk free.

So while Style may not be directly working with the police, he is working with Kant who he knows is working with the police. By proxy, Style is involved with the police, but in front of the empty pool, he makes it clear to Fadel just what that involvement actually entailed:

Style: Kant asked me to take you out so you could leave him alone and he could freely investigate. Fadel: What did he get out of it? Style: I don't know! That ain't my business! All I was asked of is to take you out.

And this, too, actually is true! Since finding out, Style has literally not discovered a single thing that could be remotely useful to the police investigation:

He's found out that Fadel likes to gym at night. He's found out that Fadel uses tenderloin in his burgers. That he runs in the morning before going to the market. That he attends a grief support group.

But these were all things Kant also already knew and could have given the police if it were in any way useful for the investigation.

Even his attempts to get Fadel to confess to his "other job" (something the police also already know) were clearly in service of wanting to save Fadel and/or convince him to give up the life of crime in the hopes that Fadel wouldn't have to be sent away from Style to prison.

But the truths are tangled up in misunderstandings and Fadel's own assumptions now; and also further tainted again by Bison's own hurt over Kant's betrayal. And Fadel literally cannot see -- because his eyes are filled with tears [see: @thisautistic's gifset + my tags] (good grief, Joong, the actor you are) -- the honesty Style is bleeding from the marrow of his bones.

Because the truth is that along the way Style has also found out that Fadel is a good older brother. That Fadel is still hurting and bleeding inside because his parents were murdered. That Fadel wears his favourite bands' make up in secret because he cannot bear the thought of other's judgement. He's found out that Fadel misses Style, wants Style, and hates himself for it. That Fadel is afraid to love. That Fadel is acutely aware of his own darkness and cannot comprehend an existence that would not involve someone (Style) rejecting it. That Fadel does not believe that 100% trust is possible, but that he will get himself drunk so that he can offer Style as much vulnerability as he can physically make himself give.

Because the things that Style did find out were all the ways Fadel's heart is soft and tender and precious and worthy worthy worthy of all the love Style has to give.

And Style will stand firm on this truth because this is the only thing he has left to give Fadel.

Because Fadel knows, now, all the ways Style was unworthy of his trust, but crucially has not figured out the most important truth:

Because in all the ways that Fadel has ever known he should want, Style actually IS worthy of his trust. Style knows the truth Fadel is hiding, knows what this man is capable of, knows the danger of being in his arms, knows the likely nonexistent future Fadel has to offer him -- and wants him anyway. -- Quoted from my meta post on the "One day, I'll be your 100%" line.

And as I alluded to in the tags on @yinwaring's insightful post: Style fully embodies the belief he espouses; because even in the face of a gun to his head and Fadel threatening to kill him if he will not admit that this, too, is a lie, Style refuses to give Fadel anymore dishonesty.

And this is because Style knows that the truth matters; now more than ever.

Because Style has had days to grapple with his worry after Fadel's disappearance. Style has had a week's worth of checking the diner only to face the regret he feels about not handling things differently. Style has had to recognise the terror of thinking he had lost something he never even knew he wanted in the first place.

And while Fadel had his realisation back in episode 4, Style never had to face this until Fadel vanished from his life and left a gaping hole in the shape of the absence of Fadel's smile.

So if this is what it takes, if this is the penance that Fadel demands of him, then it is a price Style is most happy to pay.

Because Fadel does not realise is that Style, too, now knows what it means to lose a love worth fighting for.

And in the war Fadel now feels compelled to wage against Style (because, yes, that's definitely still going on), the one damning thing Fadel has failed to recognised is that his only true weapon was leaving Style behind.

Which is why Style has already won. Not because Fadel's walls have crumpled again or because they don't still have a ton of things to talk through and work out (they really, really do), but because Style has already been stripped bare (and I mean this literally, like we all recognise THAT was the reason why Dunk is only in boxer shorts in that scene, right?? Like, I know we were joking about it, but seriously, that was so very intentional and a visual representation of Style being both stripped and, most importantly, freed from the lies he felt compelled to tell Fadel) and this means he has nothing holding him back.

And Fadel can wield his gun and his words and his anger and his hurt, but Style will die on the hill of the truth that he knew and understood and chose to love Fadel anyway, and saved this last confession for when he knew he could tell Fadel the truth without any lingering deception; and when the time is right, when Fadel is finally ready, Style will be there to welcome him back with open arms and, without any hesitation, an open heart.

[discoursedumpster]

@puppypalice what do you think a Zionist is, though? Because this implies that there's some kind of Zionist organization or political party that people can join.

As far as I can tell, there are two different definitions people are using for "Zionist."

People who don't think Israel should be violently destroyed.

A specifically Jewish movement of people who love genocide in general, or genocide of Palestinians in particular.

But there's not an organization for either of those things.

You seem to be picturing the second definition? But like... what are they joining? The IDF?

I know they're not joining some evangelical megachurch that wants Israel to exist so that the End Times can come or whatever.

Because nobody is protesting those. They rarely even get mentioned.

I know they're not joining Hamas/PIJ/PFLP, despite the fact that Sinwar said he would fight until the last child in Gaza; despite Haniyeh demanding "the blood of Gaza's children, women, and elderly;" despite the fact that Gazans loathe Hamas for starting the war, routinely torturing and executing dissenters, and committing countless atrocities against them over the past 15 months.

Because at best, nobody gives a shit about Hamas. And at worst, they buy the propaganda that Hamas is "the Palestinian resistance." (Instead of the We Want To Live movement and the Gaza's Liberators movement.)

Are future historians going to be saying this about anyone who hates and opposes Hamas? Because that seems to be what usually gets Gazan activists, and Jews, denounced as Zionists.

If so, that now includes not only most of Gaza:

But also, the rest of Palestine:

That's from one of the co-organizers of the We Want To Live movement, who has twice been jailed and tortured by Hamas for organizing marches in Gaza.

He's only 24, and he's repeatedly put his life on the line for Gaza's freedom. And there is not one person in the pro-Palestine movement that will platform him, or anyone like him. Even Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib -- another Gazan activist, one who hates Israel significantly more than Howidy -- gets pre-emptively blocked.

Anyway, the context for the whole "they'll call them Zionists" thing was that the Hind Rajab Foundation filed 12 complaints against IDF soldiers.

Which does make it seem like that must be what everyone's going to be called Nazis for joining?

The Hind Rajab Foundation is chaired by a former Hezbollah member: Dyab Abou Jahah, a Belgian man from Lebanon who also:

founded a Holocaust denial group;

has repeatedly called for the violent destruction of Israel;

says Europe makes "the cult of the Holocaust and Jew-worshiping its alternative religion";

questioned the existence of the Nazi gas chambers;

and calls gay men “AIDS spreading faggots”...

...just to hit the highlights.

The article notes that there were no troops around when Hind Rajab was killed. Which is news to me, because I only learned about it on social media.

So basically, a guy who is at best a Nazi apologist started a group named after someone who wasn't killed by the IDF, but who he wants us to think was. And now that group is running "a campaign... to identify Israeli soldiers who have published videos to social media in which they commit, claim to have committed, or appear to endorse committing potential war crimes, and to file complaints against the soldiers on that basis."

@stoptheantisemitism blocked me after I said you can't just report people you assume must have committed a war crime. Because surely you can, since "they've posted themselves committing atrocities all over social media" or whatever.

But in fact, the article they posted literally says that the campaign includes people "who appear to endorse committing potential war crimes."

And no matter how despicable or disgusting that is, it's also absolutely fucking silly to be like, "Hey!! Sri Lanka!! SRI LANKA!! This guy who tweeted about wanting to burn Gaza City to the ground is in your country right now!!! Arrest him!!!!!!"

The fuck you want Sri Lanka to do about that??? He didn't commit a crime on their soil, and he's not a citizen of their country.

So I'm assuming you're talking about the IDF. But what's the point of saying that future historians will imply people were Nazis for joining the IDF even if they don't hate Palestinians? People are already calling them that today.

More to the point, it's not like there's a massive movement to move to Israel and get permission to join its military.

Is the point just to make sure we damn everyone in the IDF, whether they personally hate Palestinians or not, whether they were conscripted or not, etc?

Is the point just to call them Nazis?

Is the point to minimize the Nazis by deemphasizing what they did?

Because it seems important that Hitler not only industrialized mass murder and killed a peak of 500,000 people a month, but also:

declared a state of emergency,

seized dictatorial powers,

stripped Jews of their citizenship,

made relationships and sex with them illegal,

pressured white people to boycott all Jewish businesses,

and banned them from leaving the country without turning their property and money over to the Nazis,

none of which Israel has ever done to either the Palestinalsians, or its own Arab citizens.

like, I would assume that nobody is making a conscious attempt to minimize what the Nazis did. But it minimizes what they did either way.

[dailymanners]

I was talking with a friend the other day about bullying, specifically the more subtle and insidious forms of bullying that are more common among adults, like mobbing, character assassination, and ostracization. These forms are especially common in the workplace, but also pretty common in activist circles.

One thing we talked about was how some people can have a hard time distinguishing someone bringing forward a legitimate criticism of someone's behavior to their friends, colleagues, or fellow activists vs. trying to start a character assassination with the end goal of isolating and ostracizing someone (aka bullying or mobbing).

People will often just go along with mobbing for a number of reasons, maybe they're afraid if they speak up and defend the target they'll become the target themselves. Maybe they already had some pre-existing animosity towards the target so they're happy to go along with the mobbing campaign.

But often, I think people just either fall victim to the bystander effect, or they trust their work colleague/friend/fellow activist. Maybe they've only had good experiences themselves with the perpetrator leading the mobbing campaign, so they have no reason to question what the perpetrator is saying or doing. Or maybe they themselves have never been on the receiving end of this kind of bullying (character assassination campaign leading to isolation and ostracization) so they don't even recognize it for what it is.

What they also probably don't realize is usually the only thing that separates them from the victim is how useful and/or non-threatening they are to the perpetrator.

My friend brought up a really good point on how to distinguish between legitimate criticisms and concerns about someone's behavior vs. mobbing/bullying/character assassination. Listen to what they're saying, are they focusing on what they say this person is, or what this person does?

Are they saying things along the lines of "This person thinks they're so much better than everyone else!" or "This person is such a weirdo!" or "this person is so crazy!", or are they giving specific examples like "One time this person said or did this specific thing that I found troubling/disturbing/offensive."?

If they only have vague things to say about someone's character like "they think they're better than everyone else" "they're crazy" "they're a weirdo", how do they respond if you try to defend them and say something like "Well I don't think they think they're better than everyone else, I think they're just really focused on their work." or "I personally don't think that person is crazy, they just seem like they're really stressed out right now and maybe not managing it well." How does the other person respond if you try to give another perspective, do they get angry or offended that you would dare offer a different perspective, or do they even make you feel afraid or intimidated that you might not just agree with them on what they have to say about someone else?

If they only have vague statements about someone's character (they're crazy / they're so lazy / they're a snake / they're snobby and think they're better than everyone else) but can't give specific examples of the other person's actions, and especially if they get angry and offended that you disagree with their claims about the other person's character (when not being able to provide examples), consider that you may be witnessing character assassination with the end goal of isolating and ostracizing the target as a form of mobbing/bullying.

Of course, this isn't a steadfast rule, and there is a lot of nuance here. You really need to consider the context. If you have a personal relationship with someone outside of a professional/activist, such as a friend, romantic partner, or family member, it is more normal to vent and use more vague terms without having to provide specific examples while venting to your loved ones. And hopefully, if you are someone's friend/romantic partner/family member, and know them on a personal level, you hopefully know them well enough to know whether or not they're the type of person to character assassinate as a means of trying to isolate and ostracize someone. Not always, but I hope you do.

In professional settings, or settings that can/should call for a certain level of professional behavior such as activism circles, not only is it not professional to call your colleague a snake or crazy or a stuck up snob to your other colleagues, also consider that these are settings and circles where people are more likely to have ulterior motives if they have something to say about someone else's character. Your bestie or partner or mom might not actually have much to gain if they tell you their co-worker is a lying backstabbing snake or a stuck up snob, but your colleague who is competing with the person they're trash talking for a raise or a leadership position does have something to gain from a character assassination.

So when someone is trash talking to you, I advise you to always consider if they might have something to gain from assassinating the other person's character. What, if anything, could they gain from you thinking less of the other person they're talking about?

Another reason this isn't necessarily a steadfast rule is because of course when someone character assassinates (with the end goal of isolating/ostracizing the target as a form of mobbing/bullying) it's not uncommon for them to tell half truths or even just plain lie about something their target said or did. Also not uncommon, saying something their target said or did but taking it out of context (think of that one scene with Fred saying "I hate Coolsville" from the live action Scooby Doo).

So my best advice if you don't want to accidentally find yourself complicit in a group mobbing/bullying of someone (via isolation and ostracization) is to always make an effort to form your own opinions of someone instead of just taking someone else's word for it.

Of course, as with anything, there is nuance. You have your safety, and I'm not just talking about physical safety, but your emotional/mental well being to consider. If someone, especially someone you know well and trust, warns you about someone else, of course it's normal and healthy to exhibit an appropriate level of caution around the person you were warned about (which you can do while still being civil and professional towards whoever you were warned about in most cases).

Generally though, if you hear something unpleasant about a co-worker or fellow club member or fellow activist's character, and you don't have any hard proof of it for yourself, consider that this may be a(n) (attempted) character assassination, and consider forming your own opinions rather than taking their word for it.

This isn't usually a topic I'd write about on this blog, but character assassination leading to mobbing/group bullying/isolation/ostracization of the target really is more common in the adult / professional world than apparently a lot of people are aware of, and too many people just go along with it because they blindly trust the perpetrator and don't realize what's happening.

And of course it is more common in some settings than others. When I worked food service and retail I can't say I ever really witnessed or experienced this. Maybe it's because I almost exclusively worked for small businesses, so there really wasn't much of a social or financial ladder to climb that might motivate someone to character assassination and mobbing. Maybe shift work also lessens the likelihood of this behavior. Of course this type of behavior happens in the service industry on shift work, but in my experience it doesn't seem to be nearly as common as it is in office settings.

Once I moved on to office work, where there were more social and financial hierarchies to climb, I was disturbed at how common this kind of behavior is, and again, how many people just unthinkingly go along with it because they blindly trust what their colleagues tell them without considering the possibility of an ulterior motive, like being a bully.

I also advise you to show a good heap of caution towards anyone who is eager to trash talk and/or gossip, especially with people they're not all that close with yet, and especially in settings or situations where they could have something to gain from a character assassination.

TL;DR: always take trash talking with a grain of salt, and give people who are the target of the trash talk a chance if you don't want to be complicit in group bullying.

[tinolqa]

god I haven't mentioned it enough here. Myths of the Realm is my enemy. easily my least favorite 24-man- or rather it's my least favorite raid series of either type.

probably made worse by pandaemonium being genuinely very good? the contrast was stark.

weak answer to the question of the twelve's nature, very unambitious and mediocre visual designs that were largely too married to visual fidelity to boring statues and card designs. some real disney's hercules shit. there were some innovative or appealing elements here and there: nald'thal was genuinely great visually and conceptually, I actually respect the concept of making menphina a magical girl instead of a generically hotsexy love goddess, byregot's halo of nails, uh... the models for thalaos and perykos looked good? but overall they were a bunch of very boring idealized humans.

and my god eulogia is the ugliest thing. eulogia might actually be the most hideous execution of a concept in the game yet, you might as well just clip all of the models of the twelve into each other and play their animations at once and get the same effect. zero elegance, zero thoughtful design. it's actually shocking to see in a game where we got perfect omega as a raid boss once upon a time. even eden's promise, while superficially a hot mess, is a hot mess because it pays homage to extant depictions of artemis! art history is why it looks like that! eulogia looks like the artists were asked to recreate knife dad from monster factory using ffxiv assets.

and you might ask, well, are the mechanics of the fights better than the boss designs? absolutely not. week one aglaia was a little fun, because there being a chance of failure to people not knowing the trick of the meteors in the rhalgr fight or panicking during the nald'thal scales instead of just deliberately failing the mechanic to waste everyone's time. gear creep destroyed any chance of interacting with most of the fun bits of aglaia, and they didn't repeat that "mistake" in the other two, which were boring and easy from the jump. just an absolute void of challenge or chaos. why even bother putting mechanics into your raid at that point, apparently that's only for savage.

and the rewards... boy I hope you like ugly yellow-gold saint seiya armor and generic draping faux-hellenistic robes and vague suggestions of togas. I hope you fucking gluttons for endless less-problematic rehashes of ancient greek mythology like gaudy costume jewelry and sandals and meaningless neoclassical flourishes. did you want gear that might look like something your character would wear in a city they've visited or that has a connection to a historical aesthetic? I guess if you make believe you can stretch a tenuous bond from this tacky armor to the uniform robes and masks of the ancients. ostensibly. since we all know the ancients didn't have a societal taboo about ornamentation or making your clothes individualized or anything.

so what did we achieve? did we learn anything? turns out the twelve were real all along, but also powerless except in the specific context of having flashy anime duels with the warrior of light. it's VERY important that we say they aren't primals, because primals are only summoned by primitive subhumans like the ixal and the garleans. but we do need you to fight them to return their aether to the star because... they're definitely not primals! no. not primals. primals are fake gods, and the twelve are *aetheric constructs* based on *real people* made by *hydaelyn*, which means they're good and Not Primals. the mechanic by which they visually reflect the beliefs of their followers? definitely not the same as the one that does that for primals. their nebulous dependence on the faith of eorzeans? totally unrelated to primals, because it's apparently important for the ego of the players that *their* god is real and not fake, which makes them ontologically good and righteous.

and it's definitely satisfying to find out that the goddess whose name gave weight and gravity to the reveal of the warrior of light's past incarnation and their name... is called that because she was a failed candidate for that role? she's a consolation prize sun goddess?

for that matter it's definitely satisfying to find out that the twelve are just recreations of venat's boring ancient friends, who are largely nameless and have no significance to you or your interaction with the past aside from a mediocre sidequest. oh it's so thrilling to know that the god of crafting used to be hytholdaeus's coworker. this would mean so much to me if he had any role in the setting beyond a skill name and a rock sitting in an overworld zone.

admittedly it would also suck for the reveal to be "actually eorzea's gods did create the world and are all-powerful, boy it sure is silly that those delusional foreigners are out here worshipping kami and manusya and mrga and primals which are all FAKE, as opposed to us (non-beastman) eorzeans who have the literal mandate of heaven"

but surely there's a more elegant solution (ambiguity, leaving questions instead of a glut of answers, not making this raid series at all). was this really the best they could come up with?

[mercutio-the-velaryon]

Me when I'm having a phenomenal day seeing Mel be introduced to league and have cunty dialogue then open twitter and immediately see new fan art of Mel being cucked by Jayvik.

Let's kill the horse. I'm so tired, Finn. A day of peace is all I want.

[creatingblackcharacters]

I honestly think there is something in specifically white english teachers that make them foam at the mouth when it comes to having students read aloud books that contain the n word. In high school grade 10 we read to kill a mocking bird and my teacher was delighted to tell everyone that when reading it in class each student would read a chapter and that the book contained the racial slur and that it had to be said out loud. No one wanted to do that and when a few of the Black students in my class, along with some other Native and white students, were like do we have to its pretty insensitive the teacher then made it a rule where we had to say it or a mark would be deducted from the class participation for that unit since we were refusing to participate.

And yes there was some students who were delighted to say the word didn't matter the context as long as they weren't getting in trouble for saying it because racists will be racist. There was this one girl super shy and sheltered most of her life never even heard her say the word crap when it was her turn to read she literally broke down crying not wanting to say it and how uncomfortable it made her. The teacher just rolled her eyes and got one of the eager racist people in the class to say it.

When this was brought to our principal and school board they dismissed it since they didn't want to censor a book if it said that word it said it for a reason and by that we had to say it. I would also like to add this was a very white school with all-white teachers and a school board in a smallish town and also a catholic school. A few years later when a Native student and a Black student did projects on residential schools and the catholic church involvement, and Canada's emancipation day both students got in trouble for topics that weren't allowed. So much for not wanting to censor things huh.

"Canada's safer than the US" oh ho HO naat really!

Sidebar; It's time to let a book other than To Kill a Mockingbird be read in schools about racism. Is it a good book? Sure, and I'm not saying don't read it. But I shouldn't have to read from the perspective of a "good white" to get my only acceptable reference to dealing with racism in this world (and then told I HAVE to say the slur from the otherwise sanitized perspective, which apparently is still considered ban-able). But your English teacher wouldn't wanna hear that 😭 I'm sorry that someone like that was even allowed to be around kids, let alone teach.

[witchofthesouls]

There are many iterations of MegOp I can believe in... but not TFP.

Feels homoerotic or queer? Sure. A lot of tension? Definitely. A yearning or upon the cusp of something? I'm fucking dying right on that edge.

But TFP Megatron and Orion Pax couldn't even understand each other's histories and motivations, let alone have a hard conversation on their own philosophies, back up plans, and direction for society besides the pretty stuff. Y'all really think they fucked? Even if it's angled as 'hate sex' or casual, they fucking misread each other all the damn time, even if they vibed on the same level, which is so painful to watch. I wouldn't be surprised if one of them tried to subtly hit on the other in their own caste-derived/in-group's specific doublespeak... just for the other guy, who's an outsider, to understandingly not pick it up, but all their associated caste buddies did.

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if that's why Ratchet and Soundwave have several tons worth of beef with each other's respective friend/war leader. Besides destroying life and civilization as they knew it.

The thing is to remember, Megatron is very much a social butterfly in a way. He genuinely likes people. He likes interaction. He has the flair and disposition for it. His inherent sense for the dramatics just enhances it. But the most important thing, Megatron was literally reared within the structure of the city-states. He intimately knows the social equations for his caste, has a lot of support in terms of emotional via friends, allies, and mecha with similar grievances, and is deft enough to wade through the avenues that are available to him and he takes them with both fists (gladiatorial clades into the political arena). Violence (and emotions) is a language that's easily available to him.

Orion Pax, on the other hand, is more careful. He has to be. This guy literally came from the boonies of Nowhere and got snatched up by a really powerful figure within Iacon inside the very heart of its machinations. People were beyond rage at that treatment. Orion isn't stupid but he's playing really dangerous games with colleagues that despise his very presence and multiple frameworks that literally eat people alive to keep a very brutal status quo. Then accounting Alpha Trion's own status as an Ancient Prime with the very relic with the power to foretell future events across the multiverse... it doesn't paint a kind picture on reasons why the hidden Prime plucked up Orion. The repression and stonewall tactics that Orion, and later Optimus, use really make sense with this in mind. The Iacon Archives are a keystone of the higher castes. Orion had to moderate his entire self around those people that would absolutely snitch if they caught a whiff of 'insubordination' or 'illegal' activities' or 'strangely sympathetic to those undeserving' along with the weird little side quests with Alpha Trion. Orion had to learn really fast how to bend before breaking, especially if he can only rely on himself in a perilous environment.

All I'm saying that these two spoke Neocybex, but absolutely missed all the cultural context of each other's backgrounds that would have easily explained the 'whys, whats, wheres, whens, and hows' of their decisions and behaviors. They legitimately did see something really amazing in each other, but never actually dug deeper thinking that the other mech would immediately understand their motivations and that's what so fucking infuriatingly tragic on why they felt so betrayed by one another.

[clearancecreedwatersurvival]

Absolutely! I'll also include some gems from the notes so far.

First, to expand on what I mentioned earlier, horses make a huge number of vocalizations, not just neighs. A whinny is a loud shrill greeting call usually communicating over distance, a neigh is similar to a whinny but lower in pitch and also seeks a response form herd mates, a nicker is a quieter and even lower rumbling affiliative greeting or request for interaction (or for treats).

Here is one video on horse vocalizations including lots of others such as snorts and groans and sighs and squeals.

Horses greet by touching noses and blowing air at each other to get a good sniff. They like to explore new items with their nose and lips, and their top lips are very good at manipulating objects (for horse crimes such as trying to undo a latch or steal a treat out of your pocket or a hat off your head). Also horse snoots are extremely soft and velvety and good to pet, would recommend.

Horses. Love. Scritches.

They're prey animals and take their cue from whoever is leading their herd, which as the human means you! If you're nervous when riding the horse WILL be able to tell and will be nervous themself and might dump you off. Alternatively, a horse that is relaxed and well trained will often do their very best to keep you on their back and compensate if you fuck up.

Here is a video on horse body language, and from the same creator here is a video on the basics of horse care, and here is one on riding fundamentals. Lots of good stuff on her channel.

#free research advice for this: look up endurance racing#specifically the tevis cup#that will give you an indication of how fast the fittest horses on the planet can cover 100 miles over rough terrain @teddywesworl

#fun fact endurance riders who do 100 mile races (160km) will take about 14-15 hours#that’s faster than a walk but not as fast as a canter#they’re averaging a fast trot#and those are the peak endurance horses#while they do sections at faster paces they are not galloping the race @telecommunikate

These two sets of tags make great points about what the highest level of endurance looks like for horses. The Tevis cup is a US race, here is a documentary on it.

#Also PLEASE use reference for people holding reins when drawing a comic or animation I beg of you#how can DISNEY with twenty gagillion dollars still get it wrong????#look at a PIC of a RIDER @inebubble please share additional details of whichever disney film fucked this up cause now I'm curious

There are two primary ways to use the reins to communicate to a horse, I was taught to ride western and primarily use neck reining with split reins, which uses the pressure of the reins on the side of the neck to communicate direction indirectly. The other option is direct reining, which puts very slight direct pressure on the bit (or a bitless bridle/halter) to cue directions. The difference is explained here in this short video, and there is a longer explanation of the correct way to hold and use reins when riding english here in this video. Reins are not the only option to communicate a command or cue, it's also important to communicate through pressure on their sides by gently squeezing your thighs and nudging with your knees and adjusting your seat. Spurs if used at all are ONLY used for very gentle tapping, if you dig spurs into a horse's sides you're a dick.

Both @qh and @rival-the-rose brought up gaited horses. Some breeds of horses are bred to have additional or different gaits from the standard four of walk trot canter and gallop (here is a video explaining the standard gaits).

Here is a video of an American saddlebred demonstrating a saddle rack, here is a saddlebred doing a much faster saddle rack. Here is a video about paso finos demonstrating their particular gaits used in show contexts. Here is a paso fino gait in a natural setting (with two horses trotting nearby for comparison), and here is a baby showing it off. Both these types of gaited horses provide a much smoother ride than a trot on a non-gaited horse.

@happilyeveraftereveryday shared this great tiktok about having this exact sort of experience reading a book where the author has clearly never ridden a horse.

#an author I love had a line about being easy on their horses and walking up hills and then cantering down. and it totally broke my#immersion in what I was reading @whywishesarehorses thank you for sharing this truly unfortunate writing mistake. Going at speed down an incline on horseback is super duper dangerous and and difficult and likely to harm the horse. There's a movie that's basically a western filmed in Australia called The Man From Snowy River that has a famous climactic sequence where the MC takes the huge risk to gallop his horse down a mountainside which they had to film through camera angle trickery because no one should ever actually attempt such a stunt.

Regarding the specific topic of writing horses in fantasy novels, two authors that I think do an excellent job of this are Robert Jordan and Robin McKinley. Someone in tags also mentioned Christopher Paolini being good at portraying horses, and if anyone has other examples of writers who do it right, please add them in the replies!

And I will finish this post off with some silly and fun horse videos.

Horses playing and chasing and bucking around a field and another on the same theme and one more of horses playing in snow.

A very sweet and impressive coming out video where the rider is riding liberty (bareback without a bridle/halter) carrying a pride flag and her horse is running at a dead sprint. (inline link won't work so: https://www.tiktok.com/@ that.blue.roan/video/7124394468098313477?lang=en also on tumblr at https://www.tumblr.com/lgbt-tiktoks/691501197160546304?source=share)

Another incredibly skilled liberty display with a man working 6 horses in an arena at once performing groundwork tricks

This very accurate voiceover of two horses who are scared of a rabbit.

This person is a comedian and her entire shorts library features her horses engaging in shenanigans and hijinks. (also a donkey)

And finally the most important horse video on youtube: Horse kicks tree, farts on dogs, then runs away.

God I wish more fantasy writers knew how horses work.

‘After a couple hours at a solid gallop they arrived-‘ after galloping for multiple hours??? That horse is fucking dead what are you TALKING about. Have you ever tried sprinting for multiple hours at a time?????? If you are traveling long distances by horseback you are keeping at a walk with an occasional trot and an even more occasional canter, you are not galloping the poor beast the whole way there I don’t care how cool the aerial shots of galloping horses look in film.

Also they make more noises than just neighing. For the record. Since I’m on the subject.

[elodieunderglass]

Hi, I as wondering if I could ask you an APA referencing question? Please ignore if not.

I've got a journal article with different sections of it written by diferent authors, how do I accurately reference a section of it? I tried formatting it as a chapter in and edited book but that doesn't seem right. And referencing it as a normal journal article feels like it'll incorrectly attribute words to the wrong authors. I can't find anything in various style guides and I just thought i'd see if you had any ideas?

Hope you're having a good day!

Ah right! Bearing in mind that this is going to be specific disciplines and there will be multiple ways of doing it, here’s how I would do it when citing this post: https://www.tumblr.com/elodieunderglass/771274847061983232/adding-one-point-the-rest-of-the-fellowship-are

Or, as we are going to put it -

Ironside, N., Large N, S., & Glass, E.U. (2024). Tooks [Review of Tooks], Tumblr.

We are pretending for the purposes of the post that all post additions were written in 2024.

Now we are going to discuss it in-text.

In a review of the historical role of Tooks in municipal management (Ironside et. al, 2024) Ironside posits that the kings of Arnor, when granting the lands that became the Shire to their military allies, were influenced by the Witch-King of Angmar in a greater strategic ploy to restrict the movements of the Took family to the Shire.

In this review, Large N (Ironside et. al, 2024) independently elaborates on the evidence that “Took” is also a curse word in the context.

In a contribution to the 2024 review of Tooks, Glass notes that Gandalf is the only one of the Fellowship to curse with unbridled “salinity” (Ironside et al, 2024.)

Quoted in the Ironside review, Momos provides evidence for their belief that “Took” is a swear word (Ironside et al, 2024.)

Large N’s section of the Ironside review (2024) contains transcribed passages of contemporary conversations.

NOTE WELL that the burden of First Author includes taking the contributions of all their (et al) under their mantle. This is not just praise but blame. It’s a position of responsibility. First Author is where the buck stops, and everyone knows it; they’re the one who materially staked their name and reputation on this paper. So the convention is to always cite First Author regardless of who wrote what (because they have responsibility for all of it.) in-text citations such as I’ve provided here, referencing the First Author, are perfectly normal- you don’t have to get fancier than that with the citation itself. Keep the citations and bibliography consistent and conventional.

Good luck!

[francesderwent]

all of which is to say I think that songs like Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve and The Manuscript and illicit affairs do a lot to demonstrate what we mean by “xyz is wrong”. not “this thing you’re chasing is fun, and that makes it inherently evil and therefore forbidden” and not “this thing you’re chasing is beautiful, but if you pull it out of its proper context you’ll be punished for it in some abstract future eternity”, but “this thing you’re chasing is beautiful, but if you pull it out of its proper context it, itself, will be completely destroyed and transformed into something ugly, and that will tear you up inside, right here and right now, and it will not be worth it.”

nothing is forbidden that’s good for you. nothing is wrong that will make you happy. if there’s a very specific set of circumstances under which something is allowed, then those are the only circumstances where it can survive.

[chaifootsteps]

the music of Hazbin is so gobsmackingly awful and I'm tired of people pretending like it's not. there's a few songs that are fine on an individual level (Respectless, Out For Love, Hell is Forever) and even then I have pretty big criticisms of all of them. but as like, a whole soundtrack my god how did this shit manage to be worse than the My Little Pony: A New Generation soundtrack. idk who wrote and produced all of the songs (and frankly who did the voice direction!!) but goodness gracious how have they never heard the concept of a leitmotif, how did they manage to make every single song sound like it was recorded in a studio and not like it was being sung by actual characters, why are all of the melodies so bland, where is the wordplay, i just AUGHHHHHH it's so bad!!

i'm also tired of specifically pretending like Poison holds even a single candle to Addict. Silva Hound did not create a beat that good for this shit

It's downright tragic that the standom only ever seems to remember Addict in the context of crapping on Michael.

[the-two-of-clubs]

A r/limbuscompany Reddit thread titled "Why do people refer to Dante as a boy?" had a lot of answers given that frankly depressed me, so I wrote a huge essay. And because it's huge and the Redditors are definitely not going to listen, I'm going to repost it here. For non-Limbus fans, Dante's the game's speaking protagonist of indeterminate gender.

People will just straight up say "I just don't want to use they/them pronouns, it's either he or she and I get to pick, sorry!" and be the top upvoted comment in this thread.

When I encourage you to use they/them pronouns for Dante that's not even because they're nonbinary, it's because it's what Dante is always referred to in the game they're from, and it's because it's a less clunky standin for "he or she" as well. "They" can refer to anyone, that's why it's the single best fit of any common English pronoun for an ambiguous character like Dante. They/them is the only way to refer to Dante without making up a headcanon, whether that be a fan theory that they're Ayin or Benjamin or whatever, or a self insert projection.

They/them is something you (yes you! the reader!) could be getting used to being able to use, for multiple reasons. One of which being for nonbinary people, and another reason being not constantly being forced to assume everyone's gender all the time. To smoothly be able to use language that doesn't constantly exclude women. For example, hearing someone talk about a doctor and immediately leaping to "he/him" is a microaggression, because female doctors are constantly confronted with the assumption that they're either men or nurses.

The more you use they/them pronouns for others, the more natural to you they/them pronouns will seem. And Dante could be a great starting off point for some of you to start doing that. Using they/them pronouns can make somebody's day. It would be real self improvement that matters. You probably know a trans or nonbinary person, whether you know that about them or not.

Some of you are 100% telling on yourselves that you couldn't handle being around a nonbinary person who uses they/them pronouns in real life with this thread. The pronouns are so alien and unusable to you you're performing mental gymnastics specifically to get out of using them. Yes, nobody can stop you from using he/him for Dante, knock yourself out I guess. But also, what is your actual reason to do that? And not just some casual excuse that you're throwing out, like "you can't prove Dante's NOT a man" (why not use she/her then, hm? what if she's a woman? at the very least the correct pronoun for this would technically be "he or she", right?) Or "Dante is a male name" (the entire Limbus main cast has male names and you don't see people "he/him"-ing Faust. Seems like a specific issue you guys have with they/them and Dante.) Really ask yourself why. Why ARE you so convinced Dante is a man? No really I'm serious.

And when that question does get asked by OP here, people are arguing in this thread that men are the ones who play Limbus Company, and that of course everyone's calling Dante he/him because almost all gamers use he/him, with the whole self insert argument. Which is dismissal and erasure of women, who apparently don't exist and it doesn't matter if the game's self insert mascot represents them, despite showing up in this thread to tell you that they and their presumably from context also female friends play Limbus. This self insert argument will never make Dante a binary man, it would make Dante another type of nonbinary which is pangender or genderfluid, because Dante represents all players that play them or whichever specific player is playing them, and to refer to Dante as the concept, the gestalt, the infinite-mirror-worlds Dantes that exist on each of our phones, they/them still suffices in a unique way, to pay homage to other players with different genders than you and their Dantes which would match those genders, I think.

Calling Dante "he" is an active choice you're making, going against the way the game refers to Dante.

Using the pronouns that the character always gets referred to in the entire game they're from is the norm. You guys never don't do that, except in cases like this where it's so you can ignore they/them pronouns. You do have an actual reason, conscious or subconscious, to actively change which pronouns you're using. Some of the people referring to Dante as he/him here absolutely have biases that make them unwilling to refer to Dante as they/them and therefore they're going out of their way to contradict the source material, namely transphobia. That might not be you, but it's some of the people you're sharing this take that Dante uses he/him with.

I am under no illusion that Dante is necessarily intended to be nonbinary representation. However, some of your reasons for "he/him"-ing Dante are very much trans exclusionary. "Dante has a masculine frame"... People who look like men to you sometimes aren't men. Heck, sometimes they're cis women. And if this is the first you're hearing of it, yep! That's always been true and you should keep it in mind. We live in a big weird beautiful world. People who look like men to you might be nonbinary and use exclusively "they/them" pronouns for example, and being referred to as "they" rather than "he" might go a long way to their happiness and comfort because of a thing called dysphoria, which can be medically dangerous for people if they suffer too much of it from being misgendered too often. These people can't somehow get a different skeleton structure and look even more androgynous than Dante does in order for you to refer to them respectfully. Training yourself out of jumping to pronouns because of the width of someone's shoulders can do real world good just like training yourself out of jumping to pronouns because of somebody's career. It all helps you act respectfully and challenge your assumptions. And that can start right now right here. You can just refer to Dante or any nonbinary video game character you've been neglecting as they/them, sound it out in your head, nothing is stopping you.

And yes, before someone starts whining that I'm making "too big a deal of this" because I dropped the dreaded T-word that will get me downvoted, Dante isn't real and can't have their feelings hurt by the fact that people keep referring to them as he/him even if they turn out to have been a woman this whole time. I know I am aware. You should know that nonbinary people are reading the posts you're making and seeing how casually and thoughtlessly you're willing to dismiss even the concept of using they/them for a CLOCK who doesn't even have a human FACE let alone an obvious gender, and I for one know that were we to meet, you wouldn't gender me correctly either. You'd take one look at me and thoughtlessly assume you're always right.

Does referring to Dante as anything at all matter directly? No. It's fiction. However, words inspire people. Everyone is just referring to Dante as he/him because everyone else is and it's considered normal. A creative thinker, a leader rather than a follower, is someone who questions what everyone else is doing, and comes to their own conclusions. Coming to your own conclusions is what you will have to do with what I have written here.

For the Tumblr audience this is probably just an unsurprising PSA that Limbus fan Redditors are being weird about they/them pronouns and a bunch of weird arguments they're using to do so. I'm not trying to come after any queer person's he/they or she/her or any pronoun set Dante headcanons in particular here either, you can tell by the explanation of what dysphoria is that's not the target audience. If you headcanon characters having different pronouns when it's not just because you can't be assed to use they/them we're cool that's very cool of you.

[couldtheybekira]

strategy: do your desired killings very sparingly, but keep ryuk around with the promises of apples and just play mario party with him all day (i remember you saying you've only watched the anime, but there's this one little short strip early on in the manga about ryuk wanting a gameboy advance sp for christmas. also there's a line in the anime of ryuk asking light to play video games with him around the time light's room is bugged with cameras, and in the manga he specifically says "let's play mario golf" instead of it being vague. i figured you'd appreciate the context)

There's no poll, why didn't Light do this?

[brazenautomaton]

...those are not the only accessible sources? the reports on the scandal are public, you can read them.

from here:

Issues of ethnicity related to child sexual exploitation have been discussed in other reports, including the Home Affairs Select Committee report, and the report of the Children’s Commissioner. Within the Council, we found no evidence of children’s social care staff being influenced by concerns about the ethnic origins of suspected perpetrators when dealing with individual child protection cases, including CSE. In the broader organisational context, however, there was a widespread perception that messages conveyed by some senior people in the Council and also the Police, were to 'downplay' the ethnic dimensions of CSE. Unsurprisingly, frontline staff appeared to be confused as to what they were supposed to say and do and what would be interpreted as 'racist'. From a political perspective, the approach of avoiding public discussion of the issues was ill judged.

Several people interviewed expressed the general view that ethnic considerations had influenced the policy response of the Council and the Police, rather than in individual cases. One example was given by the Risky Business project Manager (1997- 2012) who reported that she was told not to refer to the ethnic origins of perpetrators when carrying out training. Other staff in children’s social care said that when writing reports on CSE cases, they were advised by their managers to be cautious about referring to the ethnicity of the perpetrators.

the individual people reporting crimes were not failing to report because the criminals were Pakistani, but the actual government structure was making it clear to its members Not To Talk About It. according to the investigation of that structure itself.

also, it goes on to describe how another aggravating factor was the (clearly race-focused) desire to address this only through the local Pakistani Muslim community leaders and not through, like, law enforcement. this is a Very Bad Idea for numerous reasons, because those guys have even more reasons to want to cover up the crimes!

this report has extremely confusing formatting (it's interspersed with quotes that are not separated off nearly enough) but also agrees that the racial dimension was a major factor with the Rotherham council, people were afraid of being branded racist, things had to go through ethnically Pakistani members instead of normal law enforcement channels, and law enforcement was diverted for fear of seeming racist:

“We’d be at [community] meetings talking about community issues. When there we discussed targeting taxi drivers and the Pakistani heritage community in relation to CSE, we were even discussing particular families we had concerns about. These members would push back. Neither believed the extent of the problem that we were trying to communicate… They were saying to us ‘it will cause a lot of community tension if they are targeted specifically’… We wanted their support…” A police officer

like come on you put an emdash between the quote and the attribution

Rotherham’s suppression of these uncomfortable issues and its fear of being branded racist has done a disservice to the Pakistani heritage community as well as the wider community. It has prevented discussion and effective action to tackle the problem. This has allowed perpetrators to remain at large, has let victims down, and perversely, has allowed the far right to try and exploit the situation. These may have been unintended consequences but the impact remains the same and reaches into the present day.

these aren't random nazis, this is the independent inquiry report into the Rotherham Council and its followup commissioned by the Secretary of State. the idea that fear of appearing racist was a major factor here is not a fringe thing only being spoken of by nazis, it's pretty goddamn confirmed by the people who did the actual investigating

The Council’s culture is unhealthy: bullying, sexism, suppression and misplaced ‘political correctness’ have cemented its failures. The Council is currently incapable of tackling its weaknesses, without a sustained intervention.

this isn't a fringe thing

Interviews with staff and Members of RMBC highlighted a pervading culture of sexism, bullying and silencing debate. The issue of race is contentious, with staff and Members lacking the confidence to tackle difficult issues for fear of being seen as racist or upsetting community cohesion. By failing to take action against the Pakistani heritage male perpetrators of CSE in the borough, the Council has inadvertently fuelled the far right and allowed racial tensions to grow. It has done a great disservice to the Pakistani heritage community and the good people of Rotherham as a result

this is pretty fucking major. people who are clearly progressive themselves and oppose racism, after doing an in-depth investigation, going "yeah these people did in fact let a child abuse gang go uncontested for decades due to the fear of appearing racist."

Regarding Rotherham, since it's come up again...

If I had a daughter, and a group of men doused her in petrol and threatened to set her on fire, then what would matter to me is making sure that never happened again.

This is what is moral and right. Children are small and weak. Stopping such a thing is what a parent owes their child.

If that requires changing the ideology of the entire country, then my life's work must be changing the ideology of the entire country. This is simply the work that has been entrusted to me. Whether it succeeds or not, I must attempt it.

There are people right now asking others to refrain from criticism in order to protect the reputation of the Labour government.

My contempt for such people is off the charts. But I can now see the empty space. Many of them are morally underdeveloped. What it means is that they consider Labour their tribe, and they are obediently protecting the tribe.

[gold-rhine]

by the way, i keep saying that sumeru is extremely well done cyberpunk masqueraded as fantasy, but the big part of it is also how the focus idea of "knowledge" is explored in corpo\capitalists context. like all cyberpunk explores wealth inequality and class stratification, but sumeru really focused on how knowledge - i.e. higher education, is used to keep these class borders in line. getting high education is the only option for class mobility, as the requirement for university degree gatekeeps a lot of high paying jobs even if they do not in fact require specialised knowledge, or if degree doesn't even have the actual knowledge needed for job. we have npcs, esp in world quests, who had very different dreams, but felt forced to go into academia bc this is the only way to get enough money - more blue-collar, "manual" jobs are de-evaluated, treated as "un-intelligent" and "unskilled", despite them requiring a lot of both. we have academics with their dreams shattered, bc they went in with a dream to explore the world, but were forced to play politics and take research into military and corpo contracts they hate bc this is only way to get funds. the akademia is used not for noble advance of all knowledge, but for targeted research of specific topics that profit corpos, academia restricts knowledge instead of spreading it. academia not only gatekeeps who gets to access knowledge, but also how they process that knowledge and how they use it, and it affects everything

tbh i wish we had a section of main quest where we got to be INSIDE of akademia for a bit and interact with it firsthand, bc i feel like a lot of this is in background stories and characters and story quests like alhaitham's and cyno, but i think it would be great to have it dramatized better