#but if you find your 2000s content that been on the internet for years on my website i'd be happy to take it down. I link old sites.

[earlycuntsets]

FINAL INTRO POST OF TIME

earlycuntsets (mcr) blog

abrandnewshadow blog (personal blog where there will be frank)

I was thinking it might make sense to actually describe this blog's purpose for once. I do a few things for fun on here that like minded people may find interesting resonate with. what to expect:

sourced mcr content and sometimes transcriptions/translations for mcr scans (all done by google and scans mainly from old websites). sometimes I find cool ones. I have all the ones from mcrhollywood on my website (earlycuntsets.org) and that's hundreds of scans. or go to mcrhollywood. I will always have it linked.

I like to find old websites/aol icons/graphics that about/related to mcr from the old web. I make gifs of old mcr sites because I have an unhealthy fascination with them. this is just a place for me to share the things I think are cool, if others find it cool that is even kooler.

like any mcr account, I try to find a mcr pics/content that are not as common. I do think maybe 40% of my posts are of lesser known mcr moments but "rare" is so subjective in the mcr online community. what's rare to someone isn't rare to another etc. and I don't think it's not a matter of "knowing mcr" or not. there truly is sooo much out there.

I try to make gifs of moments I think are worth watching over and over. some are from ancient crunche yt videos and some are from my mcr dvds and I try to find hq videos to gif.

I am always open to asks about any mcr mysteries or challenges are really fun to me. I've received some seriously cool ones in the past and it's always an honor to be considered someone worth asking. I have found mostlyy everything requested so far.

I am super interested in seeing what my friends/mutual acquaintances on here think is worth talking about. asks like that are more than welcomed!

I do not judge other mcr fans. if you enjoy checking out this blog, this is a safe space for mcr fans of any kind. (unless you happen to be an objectively bad person)

ty this has been early THE CUNT™ cuntsets

loll jk my name is chloe feel free to call me that

she/her

31

this blog tags:

shows interviews flyers old web mcr scans mcr scans spanish mcr gifs

bullets revenge black parade black parade is dead danger days swarm

2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012

gif is made from frankanthonyierox3 warped tour diary video on yt

and vhs thing is a gif from a sweet video my husband made (using that fireside bowl vhs I bought)

[pmpmyread]

Title: Crimson Vows Pairing: Nanami Kento x f!reader Genre: Vampire AU Summary: An ocean, a tragic death, and a plethora of unanswered questions. For over a decade, these are the things that keep you separated from Nanami Kento. When presented with the opportunity to support the efforts in Tokyo to investigate and stymie the latest surge of Special Grade vampires, you're compelled to leave your life overseas and rejoin the Tokyo Hunter Academy's ranks as a vampire Hunter, only to find yourself paired on a mission with Nanami, a reunion that sets you both onto life-altering paths. Content warnings: 18+/MDNI, blood/blood drinking, biting, violence, language, mature themes, graphic sexual content. Content tags: Vampire AU, romance, vampire hunting, investigation missions, action sequences, angsty/hurt/comfort plot with smut, mentions of death, processing of grief, power dynamics, brief allusions to mind control, POC!reader. A/N: This fic is part of the Spookinky event. Thanks to @tsukimefuku for hosting! Thank you @espace--positif for helping me with reviewing and for the banner! [Also on AO3]

“Can you show me the one with incendiary rounds again?” you asked the staff armorer. 

“Of course. Let me bring it for you,” he politely replied as he disappeared into the backroom for the third time.

Less than forty-eight hours ago, you were turning in the keys to your apartment and placing your few remaining life belongings into a storage facility. Now here you were, halfway across the world, in a repurposed classroom that served as the Tokyo Hunter Academy armory, evaluating what would be the best weapon of choice for killing a vampire in your upcoming mission.

It was quite the displacement, and yet you did not particularly feel out of place. 

The existence of vampires had been a well-kept secret until the early 2000s, when the Internet and the era of social media democratized news, and the spread of information rendered global governments and their covert agencies incapable of containing such an enormous secret.

Along with the revelation of the existence of vampires came the one of the existence of vampire Hunters, those humans with innate skills allowing them to detect, neutralize, and kill vampires with ease. As the daughter of two vampire Hunters, you were not unfamiliar with the inner workings of this world. 

The armorer returned with what you reluctantly settled on, being the closest thing to the beloved piece you were forced to leave back home, unable to board the plane until you were formally re-certified as a Hunter.

This would have to do. 

“I’ll take this one.”

As soon as the armorer registered the weapon to your name and gave you the corresponding ammo, you set out for your rendezvous point at the school’s gate.

A configuration of mixed sentiments swirled through you as you walked through the halls of the school you’d spent a year attending over a decade ago.

Some things felt the same, others were vastly different.

You walked past an old classroom repurposed into what was now a press room, where the Hunter association higher-ups would sit and give regular briefings, pretending that all things were under control and taking the credit away from the tireless Hunters that were perishing on the front lines. Every once in a while, they would begrudgingly trot out a prolific Hunter like Gojo Satoru, who was popular with the media for his blunt honesty and with the people for his affability. But not even he could lift the somber atmosphere that loomed over the city these days. 

Tokyo was living through its worst surge of vampire-related crimes yet. Several deaths and disappearances were reported daily now, some people were assumed to have been turned into vampires, and some were confirmed to have been.

The lack of support to combat these attackers did not help. As soon as it had become public, vampire hunting as a field of work, much like any other highly specialized training, had fallen victim to human capital flight, with the top Western countries benefiting from the best training and talent by sitting at the top of the global capitalism food chain, resulting in other countries and regions being grossly understaffed.

It was partly what had compelled you to leave your equally important position as a World Health Organization researcher specialized in studying the effects of vampirism and to come support your old alma mater on the front lines.

But it wasn’t the full reason. There was something else, a restlessness that stirred within you for years now, a certain dissatisfaction with life, a sense that you were meant to do something else, and deep down, buried under these sentiments, a desire to live a life that could have been.

In hindsight, perhaps it was that rumination alone that pushed you to drop the life you were reluctantly settling into and rejoin the ranks of vampire hunting, straight to the perilous field.

The same force that fuelled the blooming feeling of nostalgia that hit you right now as you spotted the vending machine that sat by the exit you were just approaching, along with the cherry soda flavor you hadn’t had in years, compelling you to stop to purchase a can.

The same feeling that enveloped you as the first tinges of sugary carbonation hit your tongue, bringing a welcomed, familiar stinging sensation to your nose.

Perhaps it was that silent wish that you could never fully verbalize, as you closed your eyes and let yourself be transported by memories of simpler times. 

In hindsight, you wondered, if perhaps it was this deep-held sentiment that somehow made the universe conspire for this moment to happen, in the exact way it happened, when you opened your eyes and turned around in time to see a foreign yet familiar figure turn the corner, heading towards the exit, heading towards you.

He was different, much different from what you remembered, taller, older, more built. He wore a suit now, you’d never quite imagined he would. He looked different, but it was unmistakably him. You recognized him first, but only by a mere few seconds. He stopped in his steps when he did.

Knowing what you knew now, you wondered perhaps if it was not something you’d somehow willed on your own. 

Your mouth went dry as his eyes anchored yours. Your breath hitched, and for a moment, you wondered if you’d ever remember how to inhale again.

You stood in awe as you witnessed a decades-old forgotten wish, uttered in your deepest sorrows, granted in the most unexpected way, as a juxtaposition that no amount of fantasizing could have prepared you for; standing before Nanami Kento, with the sweet taste of synthetic cherry blossom soda on your lips as your name escaped his in a low rumble.

And suddenly, it was 2006 again.

September 2006, Tokyo

Changing leaves signaled a new beginning; a new season, a new semester.

For you, it also meant a move to a new school, a new country, and a new language, courtesy of the latest Tokyo-based assignment taken on by your vampire Hunter parents.

This wasn’t your first rodeo, having gone through half a dozen similar moves since your early school years. You’d grown somewhat accustomed to the instability concomitant with this lifestyle of traveling Hunters, had developed small coping mechanisms, and tried not to grow too attached to your classmates and your teachers, always keeping in mind that this would likely be temporary. It got easier, as you got older, and over time.

But it didn’t make it any less painful.

While you were raised in an era where Hunters were newly revered for their innate powers, this admiration didn’t translate well on the school playground. 

Following you was a perceived air of superiority and prestige that you’d never wished to carry. Even in the most diverse of environments, it was easy for you to stick out. Being alone was one thing. Feeling lonely while surrounded by people was the worst.

This year would be different, you told yourself. You would attend one institution dedicated to training the next generation of Hunters. Even if it was in a new country, you’d at least have that in common with them, right?

Wrong.

For starters, you started in September, which was the second semester of the Japanese school year. What you found instead were friend groups already formed, and after the novelty of having a new student wore off, you were quickly relegated to your own corner.

There were still some things that made you different, like your darker complexion, your textured hair, and the slight language barrier. So for the next couple of weeks, you began mentally bringing yourself down from the high hopes you’d created for yourself and attempted a soft landing at the reality that this year would be more of the same. 

One day, you were eating lunch on the school’s rooftop. You heard their conversation before you saw them, and could immediately identify their voices. Your two inseparable classmates, Haibara Yu, and Nanami Kento.

Haibara’s voice grew more animated as he seemed to be recounting the exciting twist from a movie he’d seen. Haibara paused when your eyes met and you heard him say something indistinguishable to Nanami, then he waved at you and they both made their way towards you. 

Haibara was the one who spoke first. “Have you seen it? Human Earthworm? I think it has the potential to become a series.”

You sat quietly, for a moment, watching Haibara open his bento box. You looked at him and then you locked eyes with Nanami briefly, before he returned his attention to unwrapping his lunch, what looked like a sandwich he’d just purchased at the convenience store.

“Haibara, you shouldn’t assume that everyone has the same weird taste in movies as you,” he said with a sigh.

You were so caught off-guard by the casual way by which they’d included you in their conversation, without preamble, without the awkward introduction, as though it was the most normal thing in the world. 

“I have seen it, actually,” you finally replied. “I think it was good, but they left things too open at the end. Perhaps they’re saving it for a sequel?”

“Exactly! That’s what I keep saying. People say it’s a cult classic, but they underestimate this franchise. I think it has the potential to go mainstream. See, Nanami, I’m not crazy after all!” he said, elbowing his friend.

The conversation continued until you’d all finished your lunch and walked back to class together. It all happened suddenly and organically. You shared every single one of your lunches together for the rest of your time there. Soon enough, you did everything together, from studying to training to group projects.

The dynamic between the three of you remained the same.

With Haibara, it was an instant connection. He was so easy to talk to, especially since you had similar tastes in movies and games. It was like connecting with a long-lost brother.

With Nanami, it was a slower, more subtle connection, manifested in moments of understanding exchanged in quiet pauses between classes when it was just you two together. Or the one you had one day, after school, while you were studying for one of your theoretical tests. 

“Okay Haibara, rapid-fire questions this time. Focus!”

“Hit me!”

“What are the two types of vampires?”

“Bloodborn and Turned vampires!”

“Good. How do the two types of vampires come to be?”

“Bloodborn are vampires by lineage, Turned vampires are turned by Bloodborns.”

“Correct. And how do you neutralize them? ”

“A Hunter of equal level can kill turned vampires or above. Special Grade vampires are significantly stronger than graded vampires and must be killed by a Special Grade Hunter. Bloodborn vampires are even stronger and are rarely killed by anyone other than fellow Bloodborns.”

Nanami, who had disappeared to fetch you all some drinks from the vending machine, reappeared in your peripheral vision with two cans. He lightly tapped Haibara’s face with one of them.

“You forgot one thing,” he said, handing you the other can, a cherry blossom soda. 

“Bloodborns can temporarily cure Special Grade vampires,” he added, in his usual impassive tone.

“That is statistically so rare that it’s practically technicality. I don’t think that will be a question on the exam,” you said as you reached to take the can. 

“Why not?” he asked, pulling back on the can.

“Tell me, Nanami, what kind of Bloodborn would willingly cure a lowly Special Grade vampire?” You tugged on the can, finally snatching it out of his hands.

“I don’t know. Perhaps they have a pact or something. But there’s a non-zero possibility it could happen.” He took his seat on the bench on the other side of Haibara.

“That is way too specific. Haibara, I wouldn’t worry about it, Nanami’s just being pedantic. Again.”

“So you don’t think it could be a trick question?”

You rolled your eyes. Haibara, who sat between you and had watched the scene unfold quietly up to that point, let out a giggle. You could almost feel the inevitable teasing comment he was going to make melt onto his tongue as you watched his eyes focus on something ahead of him, glowing in recognition.

“Ah, Ieri-san. I have a question for you!” He jumped up, briskly walking towards Shoko, who was heading towards the vending machines.

“God, they never stock these machines, I swear,” Shoko lamented.

Her comment brought your attention to the vending machine, and it was only then that you spotted the glaring gap right where the cherry blossom soda was usually stocked.

Your attention turned to Nanami, who had since returned his attention to his textbook. Notably missing from his hand was his own drink, the one he’d expressed craving just a few minutes earlier. His favorite flavor. You knew this because he was the one who had introduced it to you. 

The one he’d let you have the last can of.

Nanami Kento was too altruistic for his own good sometimes. It was something that both frustrated you and endeared you to him. You opened what you now knew to be the last cherry soda, making a show of it. 

“Nanami, I don’t know if I can drink all of this. Split it with me?”

You got up and walked up to him to minimize his chances of refusing. You shoved the can into his field of view, forcing him to interrupt his reading. When he met your gaze, it was initially with an annoyed scowl he schooled back to neutrality as his eyes narrowed in realization.

“You don’t have to share with me,” he said as he averted his gaze and attempted to return to his textbook.

You acted oblivious. “I’m still full from lunch. I can’t drink all this.” When you noticed he wouldn’t bite, you added, “Come on, you know Haibara doesn’t like this flavor. If you don’t take it, I will literally spill the rest and it will go to waste. How tragic would that be?”

“Alright, fine,” he finally relented and accepted your offering, downing half of it in one shot. Just as he was about to grab his sleeve to wipe down the rim, you nabbed the can back and directly took a slow, deliberate sip from the can where his lips were a mere few seconds ago. You watched as his cheeks took a crimsoned tinge, your eyes anchoring his in playful challenge.

“I see you, Nanami.” It was all you said before Haibara returned and you retook your seat, savoring the saccharine taste of cherry blossom soda, and one of many silent, unspoken sparks that traveled between you and Nanami.

The end of the school year arrived in what seemed to be the blink of an eye, as did the end of your parents’ assignment. What you’d spent weeks convincing yourself to be a practiced indifference to the tension invoked by the separation from who you considered to be your two closest friends ever quickly proved itself to be a complete mirage on the last day of classes. Try as you might, you could not mask your melancholy.

On one of those last days, you were traveling back to campus from a rough Hunter mission.

“Geez, these missions are getting more and more intense, don’t you think?”

“They’re not only intense, but some of these are also borderline mis-leveled,” said Nanami. He seemed even more irritated than usual.

“Yes, but we’re the dream team! Together, we can handle anything!” Then looking at you, “Ahh, we’re going to miss this so much. These missions won’t be the same without you around!”

“Nanami won’t miss me.” The words spilled out before you could stop yourself. And you felt a thrill when his eyes finally shot up at you, the first reaction you’d gotten out of him today.

“What makes you say that?”

“He doesn’t sound like he will. He didn’t even acknowledge our final mission together. In fact, I think I was a pain for him more than anything else.” You replied.

“You sure enjoy making these snap judgments about me. Have you ever considered I’m still recovering from this brutal mission we were just on?” Nanami said.

“You couldn’t be more wrong. Nanamin will miss you the most! He’s just not good with goodbyes.” Haibara cut in.

“Yeah? Is that true Nanamin?” you asked, parroting Haibara’s nickname for him, feigning indifference to a question that suddenly meant so much to you. As you sat there at the mercy of his response, you felt everything inside you balancing on the edge of some invisible cliff. You wondered when exactly it was that this boy grew this much in importance to you.

“More importantly, we should get Haibara to the infirmary as soon as possible,” Nanami said, referring to the minor scratches sustained by your friend in an attempt to change the topic.

But you knew, in the way Nanami’s eyes averted yours, in the fact that he did not address let alone reproach you from calling him by the affectionate nickname that bothered him, in the way he deliberately evaded confirming the incriminating portion of Haibara’s declaration. You knew, later that month, when you stood at the school’s gate for the last time, and you embraced him in a hug, in the way he squeezed you for longer than necessary, in the way he tilted his head an angle so that this moment could stay between you two, you just knew that he meant every word when he finally whispered in your ear. “I do hate goodbyes.”

Haibara’s rambling cut into the moment: “… and besides, we’ve got online chat now! So there’s no excuse not to stay in touch, okay?”

It technically wasn’t your final conversation together, but it might as well have been because it ended up being the one you replayed in your mind the most in the years that followed.

You did stay in touch, even after you moved back overseas. Despite the time zone differences, despite the varying busy schedules, not a single forty-eight-hour cycle passed without your hearing from one or both of them.

Until one day.

Three days passed without action in reply to your last message, which was composed of you venting about the harsh winter you were dealing with in your current city.

Three days turned into a week, and a week into two.

Part of you assumed that your two friends were unusually busy, while the other couldn’t help but wonder if this was the point at which all your long-distance friendships seemed to inevitably taper off.

Only when your last message timestamp showed “17 days ago” did you finally get a message. It was from Nanami, asking if he could voice call you. You were thankful that it was a Friday and that you were uncharacteristically staying up and happened to be online at your computer at the time. You quickly typed your reply:

Yes, of course, is everything okay?

You kept your eye on the typing indicator as it appeared and disappeared repeatedly as you fumbled into your drawers, fishing for your old headset. When you connected to the call, your blooming giddiness lasted only for the short time it took you to detect the pain in Nanami’s voice as he confirmed he could, in fact, hear you.

Almost a year and an ocean separated you from the last time you’d heard it and yet it was something like no other. You didn’t get to ask what was wrong before he engaged in a retelling of the worst news you could have ever received. 

Your friend Haibara. Gone.

A mission gone viciously wrong, mis-leveled, a Bloodborn of all things. 

What the fuck.

The shock immobilized you in your seat, and until this day, you didn’t understand how you’d managed to commit every single word Nanami said to your memory, a conversation you would mentally revisit over and over again years later. Perhaps it was in the substance of what he was saying, the incisiveness of his words, or the unusually heavy emotion with which he uttered them that made the entire call painfully memorable. 

You didn’t realize how uncontrollably you were crying until you reflexively sniffled and heard it unceremoniously echo on Nanami’s side. A reminder that you were here on earth, that this was not a nightmare, that you were on this call, on the other side of the world, with Nanami.

Nanami, who had barely escaped with his life, who had witnessed the entire ordeal.

Who had watched your friend die.

You desperately tried to calm yourself down, taking deep breaths, preparing to break the silence you were only now noticing had settled between you, punctuated only by your sniffles.

“Nanami, what about yo-”

“I have to go now.”

“Wait! Let’s chat tomorrow? Or I guess later tonight, your time. If you can?”

“If I can.”

“Nanami, you’ll talk to me? This is all so fucked, but I’m here if you want to talk.” You tried to keep your composure, because how could you offer to help you didn’t seem to have “I know I’m not there but I’m here for you.”

A pause and what sounded like a sharp exhale from his end. 

“I have to go.”

“Okay. Talk later.” Your intonation was more akin to a question rather than a statement.

The call disconnected, and its summary added itself to the bottom of your group chat, a string of text, showing that the call had lasted just under ten minutes and that only two out of three group members had attended. This screen, these words would be the only thing that held your company the next day, and the one after that, and the one after that, as you spent nearly all of your free time not spent in classes or getting what little sleep your mind would allow you to, staring at the screen in the hopes to catch a message or call that would never come. 

You waited, and you worried, and you wondered.

You pinged him. Every day, for weeks. Every week, for months.

Your worry grew into sadness, then frustration, then numbness.

It took you a few months to come to the reality that you should stop waiting, that you shouldn’t expect anything, that the circumstances would not change. 

That you had had your final conversation with Nanami Kento, and that you were alone again, simultaneously mourning the death of a friend and the loss of a friendship.

Current day, Tokyo

It was under a caliginous sky that you embarked on what would be your first mission back with Nanami. You learned Ijichi was the name of the driver who was escorting you to your mission location. You had barely caught it, in his unceremonious introduction, a welcomed interruption of whatever was going to happen after Nanami uttered your name.

By the time you turned your attention from Ijichi back to Nanami, he was already headed towards the exit. It took a moment for your mind to make the mental migration back to reality and connect the dots on what was occurring. 

You were going on your Hunter recertification mission. Nanami. He was your mission supervisor.

Your mind still couldn’t reconcile what you were seeing with your eyes. You hardly felt ready to tackle a real hunting mission. But you would have to. Your recertification now hinged on it.

Years of imagining out how this moment, which you never believed would happen, could play out, and never did you imagine sharing the backseat of a Tokyo Hunter Academy issued car with Nanami on the way to a hunting mission. It was the closest you’d been to him in years, and yet somehow, the most distant you’ve ever felt.

The tension in the car was palpable. It had been a quiet ride so far. A glance at the GPS indicated you were still 20 minutes out from the mission’s location. You were growing restless. Nanami had not stopped tapping on his phone since the beginning of the trip.

“Have you been briefed?”

“What?”

“For this mission, has anyone briefed you yet?”

“No, not yet. At orientation, they told me I’d be briefed by my re-cert supervisor.”

“This process is so inconsistent,” you barely heard him mumble.

“What?” You said for the second time, feeling a little silly as you did.

He put away his phone and turned to face you. The moonlight filtered through the car window, perfectly hitting at an angle that highlighted his chiseled jaw. 

Even in the car’s darkness, there was no mistake; he was too handsome. His eyes levelled with yours and for a moment, you felt time stop. You averted your gaze for a bit to collect yourself, your eyes catching Ijichi’s in the rearview mirror in surprise, and he, in turn, also averted his. The reminder of another observer in the car was enough to school you back to reality.

“I apologize for the disorganization. The recent crises have completely destabilized the onboarding process. I’ll be your recertification supervisor. My task is to evaluate whether you’re fit for field missions, and to recommend a level for you. Seeing as you already have extensive field experience, this will mainly be a levelling evaluation.” He paused, as though to leave room for any interjection.

“Okay,” was all you could say.

“We’re heading to the lake shore forest at the edge of the city. The latest surge of Special Grade vampires points to a deliberate effort from a Bloodborn to create them. The intel collected over the last few weeks points towards this area s being a prime location for disappearances.”

“I’ve read about this. It seems to have seriously picked up in the last month or so.

“Yes. The entrance we’re surveying is opposite the one that was red taped. The goal is to retrace where specifically these Turned vampires seem to come from.”

He moved the tablet to the center seat to allow you a better view. You both inadvertently leaned in at the same time, meeting in the middle. You tried to pay attention to the indicators he was drawing on the digital map he was showing you, but your focus was elsewhere. His clean smell, a mix of leather and cedar sent you on a tailspin that somehow had you imagining what he looked like when he applied whatever cologne he had on. You desperately pulled yourself together, an attempt to prove to yourself that you were not so far gone that simple smells could make you lose control.

Until he spoke.

His voice was low, rumbling, baritone. 

“Ours is a recon assignment. Two, maybe three dozen Turned vampires are the most I’d expect, based on the reports from the previous teams who were recently there.”

And then he added, “Your first few missions back might feel daunting at first, but I’m certain that you’ll get quickly accustomed.”

You felt him lift his eyes to look at you.

Were those words of encouragement?

He was being so overly formal and professional to you. It would have driven you insane if he wasn’t also so kind and caring. It was reminiscent of the high school days where he took on the role of unofficial tutor in your friend’s group.

You recalled how your classmates gravitated towards Nanami around exam season, valuing his ability to break down concepts into their simplest forms, and to capstone his explanation with a few encouraging words. He was well suited for this kind of role, that much was undeniable. For a second, it was like no time had elapsed between the days he would pep talk you and Haibara before a big test.

It almost made you forget about the elephant in the room. 

Almost.

You wondered what this conversation would sound like, were you not on this mission, were Ijichi not in the car, were your Hunter license recertification not hinging on Nanami Kento’s sign-off.

It was not lost on you that he had, so far, successfully used professionalism as a shield against the major topic at hand. For now, you would respect this unspoken armistice, you told yourself.

But only for now.

You clipped your flashlight to your holster as the two of you advanced into the forest. You had already taken out two hordes of Turned vampires, already more than the three dozen Nanami had expected. You’d successfully taken them out.

“Something’s off tonight,” he mumbled.

Just as you were going to ask him to expand on his statement, you felt it before you saw it. It first came as a rapid movement from the corner of your eye, and you knew Nanami did too, based on his sudden alertness.

“Special Grade,” he said. “Two… No, three of them.”

“I don’t think so.”

Nanami raised an eyebrow at you.

“Care to elaborate?”

“The signature is too strong.”

“Which is why I count three…”

“No, I think it’s more than that. I think it might be-”

You felt its presence and signature for a moment before you spotted it in the darkness ahead of you. A colossal figure interrupted you, emerging just a few meters in front of you.

The atmosphere crackled with an electric charge. The energy shifted dangerously. A sudden wind picked up. A blend of foreign and familiar energy surrounded you, akin to a suffocating embrace.

Years of hunting, studying, and researching, along with an unmistakable gut feeling, helped you identify it to be a Bloodborn vampire. 

“Shit. Bloodborn,” you muttered in Nanami’s general direction.

With a practiced motion, you popped your weapon’s magazine free and counted five remaining bullet rounds. You might have been informed, but you certainly were not prepared. 

“Retreat plan?” you spoke again, your mind running through the protocols drilled into you by hours of training as your eyes searched the tree behind which Nanami had ducked a short moment ago. 

You found him standing a few meters ahead instead, out in the open. His usual composed countenance, the caution you’d known him to exhibit since the start of this mission, since forever, appeared to have long diminished.

What little light emanating from the moon above was enough for you to perceive brows furrowed in calculation, jaw tightened in concentration, determination manifest. It took you a few seconds to realize what he was plotting.

“Wait, are you-”

Nanami suddenly charged at the figure. 

What the hell?

As you watched him run and pick up an incredible speed, you fumbled with your weapon, looking to aim at something, anything, as you prepared to lay unexpected cover fire for your seemingly possessed partner. 

It was difficult to see anything in the dark, but thankfully you were able to get a surprisingly solid read on the vampire���s signature and could track its whereabouts with utmost precision. You’d have to track Nanami mostly through sound, you thought to yourself.

As if on cue, you heard the sound of metal against flesh, signaling a direct hit by Nanami on his target. 

“Left arm,” you heard Nanami’s steady voice call out from somewhere in the close distance. You moved closer, aiming down sights, and you saw what appeared to be its right arm for a brief second. It was the first and only shot you’d seen so far, so you took it. 

Another direct hit.

You watched as the figure staggered its steps, both limbs now affected, your closer proximity allowing you to distinguish the monstrous features it exhibited. Pointy ears, long limbs, and an extremely tall stature. 

You heard hit after hit, Nanami using the opening you’d created to his advantage, landing as many hits as possible. You lined up your shot as you moved closer, deducing you’d have at least one more good go at it before the beast recovered.

“Left a-”

A powerful surge of energy preceded a sound so rambunctious that you could feel it in your own body. Your eyes had gotten accustomed to the dark by now, at least enough to see Nanami’s limp body shoot off into the distance and land several meters away with a bouncing thud. 

Between being paralyzed at the prospect of the worst-case scenario, and the shock of having a Bloodborn vampire, in its most feral form, now fully set its attention on you, your attempt at calling out for Nanami wound up getting caught in your throat. 

You quickly started backing up, mentally mapping out the quickest way to back your way toward where you’d watch Nanami land and then back out through the nearest exit. You weaved off the beaten path to put both distance and some foliage density between yourself and your threat. 

What you had in heightened senses, the vampire seemed to counter with speed. You watched as the figure weaved between the trees, rapidly closing the distance between you two.

You took a shot. It landed on a neighboring tree trunk. 

Four bullets left.

You emerged from the wooded area and stumbled onto a fork in the road. 

You could sense but not see the beast closing in on you. You turned around and shot in its general direction. It completely whiffed.

Three.

You chose the direction you judged would lead you closest to Nanami. The closer the vampire got to you, the more you felt an uncanny draw to it. It was as though it was trying to communicate with you. 

It was gaining ground. You had to change strategies. You aimed and shot two bullets in a double-tap succession. One of them grazed the Bloodborn, and the other one missed.

One.

You turned around and broke into a sprint, hoping that the speed gained by running facing forward would make up for the fact that you wouldn’t be shooting at your target anymore. 

Your mind quickly flitted to a bird’s-eye view of your current predicament, about how quickly this had all gone wrong, about the domino chain that started at your dissatisfaction with life and would potentially end with an abrupt, violent ending of it, about Nanami Kento, the old friend you’d just reunited with and who likely needed your help now more than ever.  

Something snapped in you with that last thought, and for a brief second, you empathized with the way Nanami had thrown himself at his adversary a few minutes ago. Weaponizing your desperation, you stopped in your tracks and turned around. You pointed your gun at the approaching figure. You aimed down sight and you took your last shot.

The sound of your final incendiary round crossing into the air echoed through your ears and your mind as both your vision and sound faded out. In your suddenly weakened state, you felt the distinct stifling presence of a vampire closing in on you. Shortly after, you felt limbs around you, decidedly not human, grabbing you and slinging you over its shoulder. 

And the world faded to black.

1870s, Atlantic coast, Northern West Africa

The setting sun casts a warm hue of crimson red into the sky, carrying an uncanny air of peacefulness and tranquility; the energy that occupies the beach below is anything but.

Two figures scurry towards the coastline. The Bloodborn vampire reaches it first, and she waddles her way into the water until its level hits her midsection. She frantically unsheathes her dagger from her waist belt; it glows amber, both heat and light emanating from it.

She turns around just in time to watch the Hunter who accompanies her catch up to her, halting just at the coastline. Her eyes meet his just in time to watch him school his worried countenance back to fervent determination. 

Without further preamble, she chants an incantation that predates humanity itself, a mother’s plea, to both the forces of Light and of Darkness. The surrounding air shimmers as she slices her palm open with her knife, only slightly wincing at the sensation of the action that will seal her fate.

She watches as the drops of blood drip from her hand, coagulating on impact with the sea water below her and forming into a carmine coloured bead, which she picks up into her hand and brings to her lips. The next words she utters are whispered, a caveat, a Bloodborn’s insurance. The bright glow of her knife disappears, replaced by a wraith-like texture.

She feels her life force weakening as she waddles her way back to the coast. She knows she’s on the clock. The Hunter takes notice of her struggle, furrowing his eyebrows as he makes the trek as if to meet her halfway. She lifts her hand up to signal him to stop. He reluctantly does.

When the vampire finally reaches the Hunter, he opens his arm, revealing the small baby girl he is protectively holding, wide eyes blinking up at her parents. The woman bends down and kisses her forehead. Throughout this entire ordeal, this is the only time the mother truly feels emotive, the only time her tears form at the corners of her eyes.

She brings the crimson bead up to the child and slips it under the thin garment she is wearing, placing it just over her heart, and presses down. She watches as the blood turns back into its sanguine form and gets completely absorbed into the child, illuminating her small body for a brief second before she returns to normal, an action that seals the fate of the child and of their lineage. 

Only then does the woman bring up her attention to the man, who has been watching her intently the entire time, with love and reverence but also worry. 

“Don’t look so glum, Mr. Hunter. By the beach, together, for the rest of our lives. You lived up to your promise.”

On the beach, in the distance behind them, the distinct sound of Dongola horse hooves hitting the sand can be heard.

“For eternity,” he corrects.

“What’s that?” She asks, playfully feigning ignorance for one final time.

“By the beach, together, for eternity. That was the promise.”

“That will come too. But not before you complete your task.”

“The curse ends here.”

A promise to a Bloodborn from her consort, sealed with a final kiss on her forehead.

The woman walks towards a rocky structure by the coastline, leaning her back against it before she impales herself with the knife.

The Hunter turns his attention to the approaching delegation of his peers.

He raises one arm in surrender. He tells them he won’t resist. His only ask:

“Spare the child! She’s human.”

The Hunters don’t trust their betrayer and take the child from his arms. He holds back for a second and this is the only time he shows the slightest bit of resistance.

One of the Hunters brings a talisman to the child’s face. To the Hunter’s relief, it glows the right color. Now reassured that his child will be spared, he lets himself be taken prisoner by his former allies.

Now he could accept his fate.

Current day, Tokyo

Your eyelids fluttered open to fluorescent lights and the low hum of a heartbeat monitor. It took you a moment to remember that you were in fact, not visiting your grandmother in her village, nor were you waking up in your apartment at home, but you were in a school infirmary, on the other side of the world, in Tokyo.

Memories of the night’s events rushed back to you, like a wave washing back to the shore. The sensation of being carried by arms you knew could only belong to a vampire was indelible. The pain you’d felt before you lost consciousness. In fact, you felt surprisingly energized now, all things considered. Only once she spoke did you notice Shoko in your peripheral vision. 

“Welcome back,” she said in the flat tone you fondly remembered her by.

“How long was I out?”

Shoko glanced at the clock after glancing at the clock hanging on the wall. 

“Almost an hour now. Nanami was quick to bring you here. I do wonder how many traffic laws he violated to get you here so quickly. Poor Ijichi got relegated to the backseat and got carsick.”

You raised yourself on the bed and sat down, noticing the IV still hooked to you. 

“Is he okay?”

“It’s carsickness. I think he’ll be okay.”

“I meant Nanami.”

“Oh, Nanami seemed completely fine.”

“Seemed? As in, you didn’t examine him?”

“I didn’t have to. He said you were the only one injured out there. Okay, now I have to ask, are you feeling okay?”

Shoko’s question had you wondering for a second. Last you remembered, Nanami had launched across quite a distance. Surely, he must have sustained more than a few scratches. 

“Where is he?” you asked, evading her question. 

“He was here a moment ago. I think he went-”

Shoko never finished her sentence. Appearing in the doorframe at that exact moment was Nanami, holding a stack of papers in one hand and a soda in the other.

Cherry blossom.

He’d taken off his glasses, and you could see the marks where they usually sat on his nose. His eyes lingered on yours for a second. It was the first time you’d made actual eye contact since your reunion. This time his thick glasses were not there to hide his micro-expressions. He looked neatly disheveled, his hair was slightly out of place, and his tie was loosened. Was it a hint of relief that you caught in his hazel eyes?

“You’re up.” A statement rather than a question. Whatever it was, you watched it disappear just as quickly as it had appeared before he made his way inside the room, moving around Shoko who had stopped what she was doing and was quietly observing the interaction. You had almost forgotten that she was in the room. 

“I am,” you replied cautiously.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

You turned and looked at him for a moment before turning to Shoko.

“I’m fine, right? Please tell me you’ll discharge me right now.”

Shoko stared at you for a second, as though she was evaluating her response. 

“Only if you promise to show up to a follow-up tomorrow.”

“I will, promise.”

 “I need you to sign a few things, protocol, since it’s your first time here. I’ll be right back.” Shoko’s eyes moved between you and Nanami, as though she was hesitating to leave you two alone.

When she was finally out of the room, you quietly watched as Nanami approached you, and placed the soda can on your table side, his silent offering, before sitting on the visitor’s seat across the room.

“How are you feeling?” He repeated his question, and it somewhat irritated you.

“I don’t know, Nanami. Physically I’m feeling okay,” you said, as you attempted to cross your arms but got restricted by the IV drip still hooked to you. Without thinking, you swiftly ripped it off in frustration.

Nanami watched you impassively.

“And otherwise? Do you remember what happened?” He pushed.

“Do you?” you asked, your tone coming out more accusatory than you’d intended.

“I do, but also, I wasn’t the one who passed out.”

“Really? I guess you’ll have to teach me your ways, then. I watched you fly a good distance and heard the way you landed behind those bushes. I’m surprised to see you without a scratch.” 

“You sound disappointed.”

You stared at each other for a few seconds. You always found Nanami to be relatively harder to read. But now he was decidedly a shut book. 

“We should get our stories straight.”

“Excuse me?”

He gestured to the stack of papers he was holding and handed you a copy. Mission report was the heading.

“We were split off. We should align our reports so they match. What was the last thing you remember?”

You narrowed your eyes at him, and you thought he must have felt it judging by the uncharacteristic manner by which he was evading your glare, choosing to fix the report he was holding instead, as though it carried the answer to his question.

“Why would we need to line up our stories? We should just report the truth.”

“If our stories differ too much, or if there are gaps in the sequence of events, it will raise questions and it could affect your recertification status.”

If the circumstances of this entire mission didn’t feel sketchy enough so far, this bit definitely sounded off. He was speaking so casually about such a critical mission. His apparent indifference was driving you insane. You felt like a pot about to boil over. 

“If I didn’t know you better, I’d think that you’re holding my recertification over my head and that you’re asking me to forge my report.”

His head snapped at you, irritation now visible in his knitted brows. Finally, a chink in his armor.

“Your next sentence better be that you do know me better,” he said, sounding annoyed. Finally, some emotion.

“Why should it be? The truth is, I really don’t know you, Nanami. A decade ago, I thought I did. But now?”

You felt yourself slowly losing control over your voice. The heart rate monitor started beeping, signaling your increasing heart rate. 

His eyes narrowed at the monitor and you could have sworn that they softened when they returned to yours. When your name left his lips in a low whisper, you felt the first tears stinging your eyes. 

“You should try to remain calm.”

And you lost it. A decade’s worth of frustration spilled before you could process the words.

“I was calm for over ten years, Nanami. A decade without a single sign of life from you. Do you know I got extremely sick and couldn’t eat for over a month after that last call? Do you know the number of sleepless nights I spent wondering what exactly happened? Worrying about you and your well-being? How long does it take to send a brief chat message? ”

“I got logged out and could not log back in.”

“You got logged… You’re telling me that the reason I never heard from you again was because you conveniently got logged out of a messaging app a mere few hours after you called me to deliver the most devastating news? I call bullshit.” 

“I did get logged out, eventually. But you’re right. I was dealing with the most brutal and gruesome loss imaginable, so you’ll have to excuse me if I didn’t drop everything to get back to you right away.” His voice was growing in a frustration that increasingly mirrored yours.

Each sentence was a new arrow in your quiver. Your tears were freely flowing now, the sentiment of scorn rising to your head as you lined up the next words.

“You gave up, Nanami. You didn’t get back to me at all. He was my friend too, and you robbed me of a proper mourning. I couldn’t even get his address to send proper condolences. What you did was completely fucked up, and you know it.”

In the past, in the rare moments you’d been able to suspend disbelief and delude yourself into imagining ever crossing paths with Nanami again, you’d played out the different directions this conversation could take. In your hazy enactments, you’d imagined this scenario to be a lot less confrontational and always believed you’d be able to approach discussing this tragedy with sympathy and a certain level-headedness. 

You told yourself that normally, you would. And while there was nothing normal about the last twenty-four hours you’d lived through, it didn’t make you feel any less guilty for the reproachful tone you’d slipped into and wielded against him.

Nanami got up and handed you a box of tissues from the counter. You expected him to return to his seat, but he stayed where he stood just by you.

“The Bloodborn we ran into today. I’ve been tailing it for the last ten years. Today’s confrontation was the first time I’d gotten this close since…”

Nanami did not need to complete that sentence for you to put two and two together. If you thought your guilt couldn’t get worse, you were proved wrong at that moment.

“Lately it’s grown an army of Turned and Special Grade vampires at his beck and call. He’s the source of the latest surge. It seems to be going for numbers over strength at the moment. They’ve formed a perimeter around what I suspect to be his base of operations. I left my life behind once, but I haven’t halted my hunt. And I certainly haven’t given up on anything, or anyone.

“I came back to the school because they happen to have the resources and intel that will be useful to stopping this menace, particularly now that there is public pressure and internal interest in actually stopping this threat. This is the closest I’ve come to bringing justice for Haibara…” he paused, his breath hitching ever so slightly, and only then did you realize that this was the first time either of you had uttered your dear friend’s name. 

He returned to your side. “But none of this happens without weakening the Bloodborn. And with public scrutiny and the recent emphasis on protocol…” 

“Okay, I understand,” you said, cutting him. “I’ll line up my report with yours, to avoid scrutiny, but only on one condition. And it’s non-negotiable.”

“And what is that?”

“I get to go on all missions related to this matter too. 

“I don’t-”

“Non-negotiable, Nanami, I insist on this.”

You saw him glance at the heart rate monitor before he finally relented with a nod.

“Are you sure you’re feeling alright?” That this was his third time asking you was not lost on you. He seemed hellbent on closing out the conversation with you with more gentleness than he’d opened it.

It made you question if you were imagining it.

“Sign this, then you’re discharged,” Shoko said as she returned to the room with visibly more urgency than she’d left it.

“A sudden eagerness to get rid of me, Dr. Ieri?” You chirped in your best attempt to engage in a tone that you hoped would draw her attention away from what you could only imagine was still very much a teary countenance.

“As much as I’d love to keep you with me, I’ll need the room.” Her voice was grave as she absentmindedly handed you your discharge documents before adding, “There’s just been another major attack.”

An air of gloom hovered over the school for the following days. You learned, both through hearing firsthand accounts of your surviving colleagues, and through their reports, of the gruesome details of the latest attack. All indications pointed towards the same Bloodborn’s elusive hideout as being ground zero for the crisis at hand.

You’d sat in the briefing room the day following your first mission, listening as one of the squad leaders detailed the way by which the turned vampires had prioritized Hunters as their targets, and had successfully done so, based on the death count. He’d vocalized the odd configuration of the two conclusions drawn from this latest failure. That the number of human casualties might be lessened with this shift in strategy and newfound sophistication from the vampires, but that Hunters would be the ones to pay the ultimate price. 

“Hey, what are your thoughts on all this?” You caught Nanami at the end of the briefing just as he was about to slip away.

“On what, specifically?”

“This latest attack, it almost feels retaliatory.”

“All vampire attacks against Hunters are retaliatory by definition.”

You rolled your eyes at his pedantry. Some things never changed.

“I know that, but you’ve read the reports, yeah? There were cases where they literally walked past human targets and spared them. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before. Have you?”

“So by retaliatory, you mean…”

“I mean against us, you know, considering how our last mission went.”

“We shouldn’t talk about this here,” he said, in a lowered voice.

“But we will talk about it right, Nanami? It’s already been a couple of days. I know what we put in the report doesn’t tell the full story.”

“Nanami-san!”

A younger fellow Hunter had just turned the corner and called out to him. You only recalled Ino’s name by the way he stood out from the other hunters with his energetic demeanor. Without knowing him beyond that, you found that he bore an uncanny resemblance to… 

“Have you been assigned the stakeout mission yet?” Nanami turned back to you, cutting into your thoughts.

“I have. In two days… with you.”

“Good. So we’ll talk then.”

With that, he broke away from you and began walking towards Ino. Judging by the handful of interactions you’d observed between the two, the younger Hunter seemed to have taken a great respect towards Nanami. This didn’t surprise you one bit, but it made you wonder who was the other version of Nanami Kento, the elusive man beneath the thick mask he’d put on over the last decade?

You knew he had the answers. But you would not wait on him to discover them.

It was Nanami himself who’d sparked the idea within you, by his revelation both about the Bloodborn’s connection to Haibara’s death and his intention of leveraging the school’s resources. Thus you found yourself, later that afternoon, in the school library, digging through the Tokyo Hunter Academy archives.

With the budgeting issues the school had gone through, the digitization of hard-copy reports was at the bottom of the list of what was being prioritized. You figured that perhaps there was something that was missed, anything that could help shed some light on the motivations of this old new adversary. 

Your hopes were dashed after a couple of hours of tallying the hard copies of what was available in the school portal, as you realized that all the digital versions of the reports surrounding this particular Bloodborn vampire were accounted for.

You raised yourself, perhaps a bit too abruptly, from the crouched position you’d held for the better part of the last half hour, sifting through the bottom shelf that covered the year 2006, feeling a bit lightheaded and disoriented, and dropping the file you were holding as a result.

“Shit,” you muttered to yourself as you picked it up and mindlessly opened it. 

Having read these countless times, you instantly identified the words that comprised the report from one of the first responding hunters, the one that had found the two young student Hunters who had encountered a new, underestimated foe; Nanami in critical condition, and Haibara deceased.

You recalled that one day, a couple of years following the incident, you had been so desperate to find out everything you could about it that you’d managed to connect to the Global Vampire Hunting database, and with the help of stolen credentials from your mother, successfully pulling the files related to this mission gone wrong and sneakily printed them out. You’d since committed every line to your memory.

Which is why the discrepancy stood out immediately to you, like a sore thumb.

Your heart rate sped up as you fumbled with your phone, not wanting to waste time making the trek out to the computer room to sign in to the network. A few authentication clicks and you were in.

You pulled out the digital version of the same report and quickly scrolled down to the section you needed, the line that began with “number of vampire signatures detected at the time of arrival”. You couldn’t help the gasp that came out of your mouth as you read your phone, then the paper report, then your phone again.

The number on your phone was the one you’d always believed it to be: one. It made sense, as it was the signature that matched the Bloodborn.

And yet, in the hard copy version, the number shown was two. One signature belonging to the Bloodborn. The second one was unidentified. The paper report also mentioned that the signature was only detected momentarily before fading away.

Even more shocking than this revelation was the very presence of this discrepancy.

What was the truth, and who was trying to hide it?

Your second mission with Nanami kicked off on an overcast mid-January day. Having had the privilege of sampling the delicacies that were North-East American winters, this climate, by comparison, was rather mild to you. That said, there was not much to like about cold and dry weather, icy roads, and shorter days that translated into shorter periods of daylight and more time for vampires to be out and about.

The mission comprised a stakeout and mapping out the comings and goings of one particular area of the forest whose specific configuration eluded the school’s records. It marked one of the few unmapped areas of the forest, making it a prime suspected location for the Bloodborn vampire’s hideout.

The school had lent you two sets of keys, one for a car, and one to a literal cabin in the woods, to serve as your base of operation for the upcoming days. This was supposed to be a solo mission, and you imagined that his request to have you accompany him had raised a few eyebrows and God knows how he managed to make it happen, but none of that was not your concern.

No, your concern was to solve the enigma that was the connection between Nanami Kento and this Bloodborn vampire, and this mission would serve as the perfect stage for your investigation.

You decided that your best bet would be to ease Nanami into becoming comfortable around you. Anything less and he would revert back to shutting you out. 

This endeavor proved to be a difficult feat, at first.

The cabin was one of those chalet-style units, its layout symmetrical, barring one difference. It contained one primary bedroom at one end and a guest bedroom on the opposite. From the moment you arrived, Nanami dropped his duffel bag into the guest bedroom, marking the end of whatever debate you were going to have about the decision before it even started. From there, a mental border was drawn, separating both sides of the house, one that was only crossed on rare occasions, when you were using the central kitchen. 

You knew he couldn’t avoid you forever, especially not in this predicament. So on the first night, you bode your time. 

You both decided to begin your patrols as close to sunset as possible, to maximize the chance of catching prime-time vampire activity.

On the first night, the patrol began quietly, the sound of your trudging steps in the fresh snow your only companion. After a while, he finally broke the silence and started sharing his findings about the Bloodborn. It was the most you’d heard him talk since your reunion so you actively listened as he recounted in chronological order, all of his encounters with the wretched beast.

It was not lost on you, that he’d begun at his first encounter with the Bloodborn following the initial incident, which would have been years later. But you took what he gave you, and you interjected with clarifying questions that helped paint a better picture of the years you’d spent apart. By the end of that patrol, you’d managed to pinpoint a perimeter around which the hideout was most likely located.

The second night began with him asking you questions that you would have gladly welcomed just a few days prior. Now that you were on the clock, you were not fond of the idea of spending your limited one-on-one time discussing yourself rather than him. But you took the bite and tried to steer the conversation with your answers.

You talked about your experience studying public health, about your research around vampirism, and your work at the World Health Organization to find a cure for people who were recently turned.

When Nanami admitted to having followed and read your research and gave praise to the specific advancements you’d contributed to the cause, you felt conflicted. Part of you felt flattered, no, your heart soared at the fact that he’d meticulously read and understood your work, at the idea that he’d even been thinking of you in any way, even all those years later.

The other part of you wondered why he hadn’t reached out and resented the fact that he had found a way to stay connected to you while severing any type of access to him.

This dilemma dampened your mood as you almost found it hard to match Nanami’s tempered optimism after you’d stumbled upon a cavernous opening from which you’d observed several Turned vampires stumble out, indicators of an entrance point to the Bloodborn’s hideout.

You’d all but written off the evening as a failure until the end, when you returned home and you were ready to split off for the rest of the night, but saw Nanami waiting for you at the door as you took off your boots.

“I want to apologize for not reaching you out for all those years. I went through it after… Haibara’s death. But it was no excuse to inflict more suffering on you. Nothing can change those years, and that time, but if you ever want to talk about it, about him, about the past, about the memories, know that my door will always be open for you.”

You were speechless. This truly came out of left field, and though you’d always wondered what this apology from Nanami could sound like, you found yourself more than unprepared for it when it finally came. So you simply stared at him.

“Good job out there today. Have a good rest of the night,” he said after a moment, as he turned away and closed his bedroom door behind him.

That encounter left you so agitated that you’d barely caught a wink of sleep, a factor which more than likely played a role in the events of the next day. 

The day had already started differently from the previous ones. Nanami had woken up earlier than usual and had gone for a walk, something you learned when you woke up much later through the text message he’d left you.

When he came back, the sun had already set, and you were already running behind your planned schedule, which comprised placing inconspicuous trackers into the ground surrounding the suspected hideout location. When you questioned him about it, he’d been uncharacteristically short and vague about his absence, something that only added to your fatigue-induced irritability.

The previous day had brought along with it some milder-than-usual temperatures, which had caused large puddles of melted snow which was now turning into ice under the freezing night temperature. It made the trek down to the hideout even more treacherous. You’d both slipped a few times, further slowing your advance. 

But the night quickly and drastically shifted tones when you found yourself confronted with a fully transformed Special Grade vampire. It looked just as monstrous as the Bloodborn you were chasing, except it was smaller in stature and still retained some of its humanoid features.

This one was a strong one, and had somehow slipped your senses until the last possible second, when it came up behind you and slashed at you, its sharp claws cutting through your thick coat clean through the skin of your left arm. 

“Behind you!” you called out to warn Nanami, who was just a few steps ahead of you, seemingly as oblivious as you were. 

He turned around, engaged in a flail more than a slash, only in the general direction of the vampire, missing his target and quickly turning back away from you. 

You had never seen him miss. Ever.

Only then did you realize just how bad of a shape he was in. You had half a mind to equip your gun, before realizing that you may have to take the close quarter fight yourself. You watched as Nanami bent over his knees, seemingly on the brink of collapsing.

You could almost hear the mental calculation the vampire had made in its head, as it charged for who it now understood to be the weaker target. Your aim was unsteady, the vampire’s movements too erratic. As much as you trusted yourself with a gun, you refused to risk the sliver of a chance at harming Nanami. 

You charged behind the vampire, who was now closing in on Nanami. You failed to see the vast patch of ice ahead of you. Your slip sent you on a trajectory that would have found first into the ground. 

But in yet another intense moment of desperation, you refused to yield to gravity. You twisted your body upwards, tapping into a kinetic force that surprised even yourself, and launched yourself upwards into the air.

When you saw the ground rapidly approaching you this time, you redirected your movement to target the vampire who had yanked up Nanami by the collar and landed squarely on him. Without thinking, you nabbed your partner’s cleaver from his loose grip and dove the blade into the vampire beneath you, putting a definitive end to the attack.

When Nanami dropped to his knees beside you, still catching his breath, you climbed off the vampire and kneeled next to him, bringing your face down to his level. He closed his eyes and tilted his head down, and you just knew he was hiding something.

“Nanami,” you said, as calmly as your adrenaline would allow you. You unzipped your coat and took out your right arm, pushing up the sleeve of the right arm of your sweatshirt.

“Nanami,” you called out again, a warning this time, as you prepared to vocalize what you’d known deep down for days now and had refused to acknowledge on the surface. 

“I see you, Nanami. I know what you are. You need to drink. Here’s my arm. Please. Enough with the games.” 

When the figure before you finally anchored your eyes with his now bright red pupils, you told yourself that it was the beast within that was in control when it forcefully yanked your other arm out of your coat instead, the left one, the injured one; when it swiftly pulled back the sleeve of that arm, revealing flawless golden brown skin and that had, in fact, fully and very much unnaturally healed. You told yourself it was the beast that spoke when it finally uttered these words in a voice you barely recognized, before biting down on your arm.

“Shouldn’t I be saying the same to you, Miss Bloodborn?”

A jolt coursed through your veins as his fangs pierced your flesh. Your face was heated, and you felt yourself transform.

The realization that hit you at the moment felt like a reversion to a mean, like a final puzzle piece finding its place, like order being restored.

You were falling backwards, losing your balance. Everything felt both slow and quick at the same time. You desperately clung to consciousness as you grabbed onto the presence before you. It was calling out to you, repeatedly so. Was it saying your name? Familiar safety wrapped in a foreign host, ruby orbs reverting to a recognizable hazel color, hints of the man that once was fighting to regain surface.

Nanami…

His name melted on the tip of your tongue, a silent prayer as darkness enveloped you.

You awoke with a start and immediately felt the difference. You were back at the cabin, lying in your bed, but it felt different. The surrounding colors were more vibrant, the sounds louder, the scents stronger. You felt like a new firmware was downloaded into your brain, and you were armed with newfound knowledge, an instinctual drive.

You were awakened.

You felt him before you saw him, by the heat that radiated from him, the steady but fervent tempo of his heartbeat, the pureness of his soul.

He carried with him an aura, an unmistakable signature so familiar to you, one that you now realized you’d felt from the moment you met him all those years ago, faint and unidentifiable as it had been to you at the time.

A Special Grade vampire.

But a good one?

And when you finally turned your head to face him, sitting in the chaise that bordered the opposite wall, he must have felt your movement because he raised his to face you at the exact moment. 

Trying to get a read on Nanami had never been easy. And despite your newfound ability to read his vitals so clearly, you still were left playing the usual deciphering game.

“How long have you known? And how did you know before me?” you finally asked.

“I had my suspicions… The first mission we went on. You were right in your recollection that the Bloodborn launched me back. What you failed to remember is that we both were, you even more so after he’d chased you. The state I found you in… I thought I had lost you…” he paused, and you watched the pain cross his features as recalled the moment.

“I intended to carry you back to the car, but then you healed on your own. It was both strange and familiar. By the time we got you to Shoko, you were exhausted but fully healed.”

You sat up on the bed, suddenly feeling restless. He stood to stand at the feet of your bed to stay in your view. You patted the spot in front of you, inviting him to sit.

Only then did you realize that he’d long since crossed your unspoken border for the first time and that he was in your space now, in your room.

The first of many breaches to occur that night.

In your shared silence, bridges were being built. In your curious glance, an unspoken question hung.

Nanami took a deep breath and began telling the story of the day his life changed.

He recounted how the mission had started, how Haibara had been optimistic as he always was, how everything had escalated so quickly, so badly. He spoke of the Bloodborn looming over him and how he was ready to accept his death. He recalled when he awakened, first from unconsciousness as he realized in horror that he had survived and that Haibara hadn’t. He spoke of the second agonizing awakening as the beast he was trained all his life to destroy.

You listened as he spoke of the moments when the despair was too overwhelming, when he contemplated ending it all, only to read about another attack, another victim somewhere in the world, and the sheer determination of ending this curse took precedence over the sweet release of succumbing to it. You noticed how he instinctively reached for his neck as he recounted this part.

You asked about his transformation and his symptoms, and he described patterns that you could now retrace in your own life. You asked about how he sustained himself, and he described depending mostly on blood banks nearing the end of their shelf life, occasionally animals when times were dire. The infirmaries had been running low on blood lately, due to the increased number of injuries caused by the surge in incidents, he told you. He’d been rationing what he had left but had run out during the stakeout mission. He’d tried to go hunt but was stalled by the hazardous patches of ice.

After a moment, you came to a realization.

“You’re still in Bloodthirst,” you said.

“I’m fine.”

“No, you’re not fine, and I know it. How long had you gone without?”

You shoved his hair out of his eyes, fingers brushing against his forehead. Suddenly you felt yourself gain access to him, to his mind. You dug deeper, deeper still, and like your other abilities, it was desperation that powered your attempt to convince him to let you ease his suffering if only for a little, driving you deeper and deeper.

Until you hit a wall.

Nanami grabbed your hand by the wrist and abruptly pulled it away from his forehead, his eyes flashing red momentarily. The beast was surfacing. 

“Don’t...”

“Nanami, you’re too deficient. I can feel it.”

“Don’t try to get into my head.”

“I’m not trying to. Not deliberately. And, I don’t need to be in your head to feel your suffering. How long have you been holding back?” You pushed.

The conflict of his instincts warred within him, clear in his eyes, which flicked between bright red and their usual sweet honey. 

“You won’t hurt me, so please, Nanami, let me help you.”

You bit your lip out of nervousness, and your sharp fang clumsily pierced through the corner of your lower lip. You were still unused to it. You winced at the sharp pain. You felt its scent before you felt the drop of blood slowly slide down and you knew that Nanami felt it, too. You could feel it in the quickening pace of his heartbeat, in the hitching of his breath, in the way he met your gaze, in an electrifying moment. 

And yet he didn’t move. It was hard to pinpoint the exact moment when breaking down Nanami’s barriers became synonymous with breaking his resolve. All you knew is that your body was now moving of its own accord, your mission becoming singular. 

You engaged your newfound strength to push him down, and you were, surprisingly, met with little resistance. His back hit the mattress harder than you intended. You straddled him at his hips and placed your hands on the bed on either side of his face. Your disposition made it look like you were the one in control. But the truth was that you were at the mercy of his expression, unreadable as always, desperate to bring relief to the man who’d suffered alone for over a decade.

Your arms wobbled as you lowered your face to his. His expression remained impassive, but his vitals betrayed it. Pulse quickened, pupils dilated, rapidly switching on and off red and amber. Your eyes fixed his. You had half a mind to offer your arm again, bravery had brought you this far, but you wondered whether it would take you all the way. Your eyes moved back to Nanami’s, an attempt to decipher what calculation he appeared to be making. 

The decision was made for you both, when the drop of blood, which had been sliding back from your lips, trickled down to your chin unbeknownst to you, falling to the whims of gravity, and landing directly on his own lower lip.

And then his tongue darted out to lick it.

And something snapped.

You couldn’t tell whether you moved first, or he did. The exact sequence of events would remain unclear, discarded to the back of your mind as you felt the acerbic taste of your own blood on Nanami’s lips.

You felt the restraint melt away with the growl that emanated from Nanami’s chest. You squeezed your eyes shut as though it would help mute the moan that remained captive in your mouth, escaping only when he forced yours to open by ensconcing his tongue between your lips, as he lapped up the remaining blood and proceeded to suck on the spot on your lip where the incision was made. 

Your eyes opened to a squint only to meet piercing red eyes. They told a story, one whose ending you’d successfully deducted earlier, one that Nanami still now appeared to be unable to accept. 

This wouldn’t be enough for him.

You felt the world tilt suddenly, and it took you a few seconds to realize that he had flipped your positions, his eyes never leaving yours. When you felt his arms carefully cushion your fall, you knew that he was still more man than beast.

You could not say the same for yourself.

Years of studying vampires, of hunting them down as a Hunter, could only help you label what was happening, not control it.

You used your right hand to pull the box braids that had bunched around your shoulder aside, tilting your head to the side to give him access to your neck. 

Under your observation, he hesitated, ever the paragon of self-control.

You reached your hand up and placed it on his, and slid it up his arm, then to the back of his head, right at his undercut. When you pulled him down, it was again without resistance. His eye color flickered faster as he got closer.

“Forgive me,” you heard him whisper, a warm breath that went into your ear and straight to your core. 

Your mind was hazy and you couldn’t tell what he was apologizing for. Either way, your answer would be the same.

“Don’t hold back,” you whispered so softly that you didn’t know if he’d heard it. 

The act didn’t shock you as much as the first time; it came in a brief sting and a sensation of soft lips that contrasted the sharp fangs that already established punctures. You gasped, and he stilled; you felt him reverse, but you stopped him before he could, pushing his head back down onto your neck. After a brief pause, he picked up where he left off and you heard the rest more than you felt it. His quick rhythmic breaths and inaudible gasps evened out as he sated himself. 

“Why would a Bloodborn feed a lowly Special Grade vampire?” 

It was a genuine question you’d asked, what felt like several lifetimes ago. Back then, it was unfathomable. Right now, it was blatantly obvious.

“Shouldn’t I be saying the same to you, Miss Bloodborn?”

You tried not to think too hard about the contempt that dripped in Nanami's tone when he’d referred to your identity, at the reality that your feelings would likely never be reciprocated.

You could have sworn that Nanami detected your disquiet, because as if on cue, he brought up his right hand, tracing soothing small circles around your exposed shoulder.

In your confused haze, you tried to tell yourself not to read too much into this sudden attuned gentleness. You didn’t realize that you too had started scratching circles with your nails into his undercut until you felt the perceptible shudder that ran through his body right as you did.

He shifted his position slightly as you felt drops trickle down your neck, and you held your breath as he chased them with his tongue, moving lower down, over your collarbone, getting dangerously close to your chest. When he closed in on the drop of blood, he sucked a little harder at the fleshy skin just above your chest, eliciting a small moan from you. The heat that was slowly forming in your core ignited like a solar flare. He stopped his movements and when his eyes shot up to yours through his disheveled hair; they had reverted to their natural hazel hue again. 

A pang of arousal shot through you violently. Centuries of dormancy came roaring back to life. The lines between human and vampiric urges were now thoroughly blurred. 

Nanami straightened up, and you watched a second conflict cloud his eyes, primal but very much human. 

The sight of your red blood over his skin should not have been doing this much to you. But it did.

“You’re going through Bloodthirst.”

A statement more than a question. He wiped his mouth with his sleeve before he started rolling it back, exposing a veiny arm.

“The first waves after transforming will be brutal. I imagine yours will be intense since you’re-”

“Bloodborn.” You completed his sentence for him. “You must really hate me right now.” Even as you identified the self-destructive mental pattern you were sliding into, it’s not like you could stop it. Anything to get him to change his mind. Anything to have him push you away. 

“I don’t hate you,” he simply said.

“You hate Bloodborns.”

“Still quick to make snap judgments, I see.” 

You sensed a reversing shift in your dynamic; his invitation, your resistance.

You said nothing in response, and he simply extended his arm. You kept your eyes locked on his as you sank your fangs into his arm. 

Nothing could have prepared you for the taste of Nanami Kento’s blood.

You were a lot less gracious than he was, a lot less controlled. It was like being catapulted through a range of vivid emotions, colors associated with feelings, sounds associated with sentiment.

You were lost in the sensations. You ached with him and you raged with him; you felt his sorrow and his devotion. Overwhelmed by the sentiments he was telegraphing, you opened your eyes to Nanami quietly observing you, his usually unreadable face twisted into a perceptible sadness. Only once you were finally sated, once the intense pang of thirst subsided to a low baseline hum did you finally pull back, your eyes still trained on his.

“I could never hate you,” he added, as though to emphasize what he’d just undeniably showed through his blood, the corners of his lips tugging into the tiniest, sad smile that brought tears to your eyes.

Nanami brought two fingers up to your chin, pushing the rest of the dripping blood into your mouth. You closed your lips over his fingers, maintaining eye contact as you brought your face closer to his, emboldened by the combination of your awakening, of his words, and of the little glint in his eye. He didn’t move until you released him, like he was awaiting for permission.

“I don’t hate you either,” you managed to whisper against his lips, before closing the distance.

When you did kiss this time, it was in earnest. It was fervent and urgent, all tongues and teeth. There was a moment you were both clinging to, both determined to not let escape. You’d never felt so attuned to someone, it was as though tasting his blood had opened a new dimension within your mind. 

His tongue snagged onto your sharpened fang, and he hissed at the contact, sending a shiver down your spine. You tasted his blood and this time it wobbled with treacherous exhilaration. The first signal that he, too, was unraveling.

When Nanami’s mouth moved downward, it was in a mix of kisses and nips and bites. He was gentle but left marks. In his onslaught, he paused just above your breast and gave the area a sly lick before he continued. He finally tugged on the corners of your shirt and gently pulled it over your head, finally able to grant attention to your left side, starting at your neck, peppering every inch of your body with his kisses from your collarbone to your breast to your abdomen. He pulled your pants down, your underwear followed. His movements were optimized, precise.  

When he stopped and called out to you, you almost did not hear over the now overwhelmingly loud sound of your blood coursing through your veins and your pants as you tried to keep yourself tethered to reality. You raised your head in time to see him hovering over your core, stormy eyes telegraphing a question. 

“Please, Nanami,” you breathed out.

It was all he needed to hear. With the two fingers that were between your lips just a moment ago, he slid between your legs and began to work you.

The gasp that escaped your lips was one of both shock and pleasure. You moaned as he played you, like a musician would his instrument, first with his fingers, then with his tongue, then with both. Your heightened senses made you feel every brush, every knead, every minute variation in movement as he found alternating rhythms.

“Hah…fuck!” you cried out.

“My good girl. Don’t hold back on me,” he said, echoing a markedly less tame version of the coaxing you’d whispered into his ear earlier, and only then did you realize how utterly flipped this script had become. Your mind spun at the swiftness by which the tables had turned, at the polarity, at the juxtaposition of his controlled passion and your erratic unraveling.

The vibration of his voiced praise rumbled into your core and tingled up into your brain, and that was enough to push you over the edge. You couldn’t coherently voice your pleasure if you tried. Only words of gibberish ran through your mind as you slowly came undone on his fingers, exhaling expletives punctuated by open-mouthed gasps of his name.

He continued lapping at you, cleaning off every inch of your surface area, until you grabbed the back of his head, right at his undercut again, your new favorite place. You brought him up to find the remnants of your blood on his chin, now newly covered with a sheer layer.

He looked so alluring.

“Nanami…” you murmured.

In a manifestation of your newfound ability for quick recovery, you raised yourself up and straddled him for the second time that night. You grabbed his face into your hands and kissed him, intoxicated by the taste of all versions of yourself in his mouth. This time it was slower, more careful, tongues caressing each other in a reluctant fight for domination, a battle you both dragged out, not wanting it to end. You found a back-and-forth rhythm that you emulated with your hips, grinding against his, chasing any form of friction, realizing only now how bothersome of a barrier his clothes were between you two.

You pulled back, working your way down to undo the buttons of his shirt, and he watched you. You couldn’t help but trace your fingers against his muscles as you did, working your way up from his stomach, up his chest, to his shoulder. He let out a soft and low groan as your cold finger traced his heated skin.

You had already grabbed his belt, eager to pull more of those sweet sounds out of him by returning the favor he’d so graciously done for you, when you spotted it, at the juncture of his neck and shoulder, a prominent scar denoting two incisions, unmistakably from a vampire bite. 

“Is this from…?” You trailed off, still struggling to label the horrific event that nearly destroyed his life.

“It is.”

You glanced at him as he averted his eyes, but not quick enough for you not to catch the expression on his face. It did not belong to the vampire, not even to the man, but to the young boy who bore the misplaced burden of not being able to protect his dear friend, and who came out of that incident less human than he went in.

You’d never known Nanami to be emotionally expressive. Even throughout this passionate encounter, his countenance carried a control that paradoxically garnered both your admiration and your frustration. But right now, as you traced a finger over the reminder of that painful memory, you watched his face twist beyond its usual air of melancholy, his features betraying the sorrow that still festered beneath his surface.

The thought of another Bloodborn being the source of the torment of the sweet man before you triggered something violent within you. You were ruled by extreme emotion, by an unharnessed urge to make things right, driven by a desperate powerlessness at what should have been the height of your powers.

How you longed to go back in time and undo the calamity inflicted by this beast.

How you wished you could absorb all of his pain, if only for a moment. 

How you desperately wanted to overwrite the damage caused by this destructive bite.

Logic said that you couldn’t do any of these things. But you were a far ways from being anything within the realm of logical right now. 

You were not thinking clearly when you sunk your teeth right where the faded scars were, in an untenable attempt to draw out pain more than blood. Your mind was a haze when your hot tears mixed with the blood you were drawing. You were disoriented when you finally relented, burying your face into the side of his neck and squeezing him into a tight hug. But you were very much in your right mind when you uttered your next words.

“I’m here for you, Nanami,” you said in his ear.

“I know,” he whispered back, after a moment. 

This wouldn’t be enough.

He shifted his weight over you, bringing you back down. Your hands flew to his pants as soon as he freed you from his embrace and for a moment, you wondered what you looked like: tear struck face, bloody mouth, disheveled hair, fumbling with his belt like your life depended on it. You wondered how it was, that after he placed his hands over yours to help you remove the last barrier of clothing that separated you and you finally looked up at him, that you found him gazing down at you in quiet reverence. 

“Can I-”

“Yes, please, yes,” you said in a low whimper as you buzzed with anticipation.

His lips found your forehead just as you felt him notch into you, and you squirmed and gasped into his chest at the sudden but welcome invasion. 

“Fuck,” he hissed. “Did I-”

“No, hah, don’t stop!” you sighed, grabbing his arms to brace yourself.

He kept going until he filled you completely. 

And then again. 

And again. 

Your bodies moved in tandem, a decade of longing that took classmates to fire-forged partners to blood-bound lovers, manifested in the most tender dance you’d engage in that night, pure affection finally triumphing over ferality, even as you exchanged the most breathless words and the most salacious sounds, even as you vigorously met each other at each thrust, each trying to prove an unspoken point, even as your bodies violently thrummed with the need for release. And when your flashing eyes met as you both barrelled towards your climax, a wordless plea floated between you two.

Don’t hold back.

And neither of you did.

It was early afternoon now. You were lying on your side, facing Nanami, who was lying on his back. You were in a mesmerized trance, tracing over his taut muscles, accustoming yourself to your newfound heightened senses of his vitals. You basked in this warm cocoon of comfort, stretching out what you both knew to be a mirage of a moment of peace.

“What am I thinking now?” he asked. You traced over where you saw his chest rumble from his voice.

“I told you, it doesn’t work that way. So far, it’s only been sensations at given times. And it seems to be in moments of intense emotion. I still have a lot to learn about… all of this.”

“It will be an adjustment. Your case is rare but not unheard of. And you won’t have to face it alone,” he said, after a moment.

“I’m not even sure I could reliably trace far enough to find my Bloodborn ancestor. Both sides of my family are from old Hunter clans, as far as I know. A Hunter breaking ranks to get with a vampire must have been considered to be the ultimate act of treason, especially in that time.”

“I might be biased, but I could see how treason can be relative,” he said playfully as he took your hand in his. You pondered on the weight of his words, on the uncanny parallels to your current disposition, on history rhyming.

“We should have Shoko check you out. We can trust her.”

“No. We’re closing in on the hideout and that beast. This is our chance. I’m not leaving until we finish this. There’s a reason you haven’t told anyone either. We have to do this our way.”

Nanami’s reservations were palpable, but you both knew that he couldn’t counter that argument. You attempted to change the topic.

“So… you heal quickly, and have heightened senses, though not as good as mine. You’re also a weakling to sunlight and you sometimes eat for two.”

“That’s certainly one way to put it.”

“This is like that video game. You remember the one with the convoluted stats, that one RPG Haibara kept trying to get us to play?”

Nanami hummed. Silence. Then a scoff.

“What is it?” you asked.

“He was hellbent on you and I getting together. Even after you moved away. He said that it was inevitable and that if we couldn’t make it work, then he would. I was just thinking that in a twisted way, he did.”

It was your turn to scoff.

He raised a curious eyebrow at you.

“You just implied that we ended up getting together. I don’t remember that happening.”

“Oh, you don’t think so? We’ll have to rectify that. After the mission.” He grabbed your hand in his.

“After the mission,” you echoed. A silence. You fidgeted with his hand.

After a moment, you pulled away from him, and turned on your back, mirroring his position as you faced the ceiling.

“We’ll avenge him, Nanami.” Your words fluted upwards, a crimson vow, binding a Bloodborn and her consort.

“We will.”

You felt the cocoon of warmth dismantle as you both made the mental migration back to the task at hand.

Two nights later, you set out to execute an assault.

You’d composed a message to the school, detailing your plan of attack and strategically scheduled it to send for the last possible moment, right before your planned incursion. It was the best compromise you and Nanami had settled on, as you looked to minimize any detection that could be triggered by the other Hunters in order to maximize your chances of success.

You’d found the entrance, combatted the weak forces that grew stronger as you approached their leader and had found yourself facing your ultimate target.

The plan had gone as anticipated, until this moment, which found you contending with the one thing you’d both failed to plan for: a mental hold the vampire revealed itself to have on Nanami, drawing from the tethering connection a Bloodborn could exploit with their victim.

At first Nanami’s movements were simply slowed, then stalled, then stopped. For the moment, it seemed to have incapacitated him.

You’d continued to dodge the vampire’s attacks as you evaluated Nanami’s condition, and for the moment that was all you could do. Your current plan of attack relied on both your dexterous movements and Nanami’s close-range combat to land incisive blows on the beast.

You’d prepared to take a defensive stance until you noticed that the Bloodborn was no longer attacking Nanami. And was instead fixing you.

Your eyes moved to Nanami’s just in time for you to watch them flicker to those crimson irises, markers of the vampire within.

The Bloodborn growled out an order in a language you did not need to understand in order to decipher its message, the validity of your interpretation confirmed as Nanami turned to you in what appeared to be a sudden, combative stance. You backed up as he trudged towards you, his cleaver wielded, his vampiric eyes fixing you in calculation. A cackle emanated from the Bloodborn, visibly pleased at the scene unfolding in front of it.

Nanami was now a few meters away from you, and you had half a mind to catapult yourself off the back wall to dodge what was obviously an imminent attack. If you could just dodge the attacks coming from both and hold off until the reinforcements arrived…

Instead, you stayed in place, opting to call out his name, an attempt to appeal to the human you hoped could still hear you, to the man you cherished.

You watched his eyes flicker ever so slightly, so subtly that you wondered if you’d imagined it.

Finally, he reached you, and you heard the distinctive shot of one of your incendiary rounds traveling through the air before you registered that, in a swift movement, exploiting a moment of arrogance on the part of the Bloodborn, Nanami had grabbed your weapon from your holster and fired a direct shot clean through its heart.

When the Hunter’s eyes flickered back to normal, showing a definitive break from his mental captivity, you knew you were back on track. He leaned against the wall for support, likely having used up all of his energy into executing his gambit.

Out of the corner of your eye, you saw the Bloodborn struggle in attempting to get back to its feet. Without a word, you took Nanami’s cleaver and used the back wall to launch yourself towards your weakened target.

You flew through the air and landed an incisive blow, cutting the vampire in half, ending his torment over the region and its inhabitants, once and for all.

You detected a large amount of familiar signatures approaching. A group of Hunters.

You rushed back to Nanami’s side, who was still leaning on the wall but on his back, having watched the final scene unfold. You gently grabbed his hand from his side and raised it up, and placed the handle of his cleaver into it. You brought your other hand to cup his cheek and his eyes finally met yours.

In the moment, it was not joy, nor sadness, nor relief that ruled his expression, but a wordless acknowledgment of a vow kept.

[bluescluesposting]

Even though this blog is mainly Blue's Clues and Blue's Clues accessories, I want to give a special happy 30th anniversary shout out to two other Nick Jr. shows, I love- Gullah Gullah Island and Allegra's Window!

Both shows were part of a big revitalization for the Nick Jr. block in 1994, with mascot Face introduced about a month before. Blue's Clues also started development around this time, and can easily be considered the start of Nick Jr.'s "golden age".

Gullah Gullah Island was a really important show for so many kids. It was one of the first preschool shows to have a black family front-and-center, and put a strong emphasis on their culture. A big step in representation- and as a white kid growing up in a small town that's more diverse now, but SUPER white in the mid-90s, it was so important for me to see media featuring kids and families of different backgrounds. It was important then and still important today- I REALLY wish the Nick Jr. channel could still show reruns of it (and by that I mean, reruns at times when kids would actually be awake to watch it, not 3 AM), but at least it's on Paramount+ (knock on wood...if they took Allegra off who knows what classics are next). I bought all the DVDs of it a few years ago before they were discontinued and I'm proud to own the soundtrack album. The songs in this show are great, by the way- I think my favorites are "Friends and Family", "P-L-A-Y", and "Move Your Body". And the theme song might be the biggest ear worm theme in Nickelodeon history (rivaling only CatDog). You can find the entire series on the Internet Archive for free!

Allegra's Window might not have been as influential or important as Gullah Gullah Island- there were a LOT of puppet-based musical shows on in the 90s- but it was still a great show. It emphasized getting used to new situations (such as starting daycare), which can be hard for very young kids, and put a heavy emphasis on music in general- which actually was pretty important as this was right around the time a lot of elementary schools were starting to cut music programs as a cost-cutting maneuver. This show had SUCH a fun aesthetic and I loved the puppet and costume designs (I've cosplayed as Lindi before and I'm pretty sure Encora was an influence on my own personal fashion style). Every Jumbo Pictures show has always had such a fun but calming feel to it. Not just Allegra, but Doug, PB&J Otter, and 101 Dalmatians: The Series as well. The songs are also really good and feature a lot of Broadway-based talent writing them (as well as the human actors performing some of them!). Sadly this one slipped into obscurity; it wasn't reran as often as Gullah Gullah Island and ended abruptly during production on S3 thanks to Jumbo Pictures getting bought by Disney. Paramount+ also took it down last year for unknown reasons (among all the Nick content taken off, it was the only one over 15-20 years old- most of the removals were from the late 2000s to now), but the entire show is on the Internet Archive.

So happy 30 years to two great shows! And once again, I miss Nickelodeon Studios a lot. The shows from the Florida studio just had such a specific feel to them no matter the show or target audience (I get the same feel I get from AW and GGI that I do from Clarissa Explains It All or Legends of the Hidden Temple). I'm so glad to have grown up with this era of Nick.

[centrally-unplanned]

As I normally do, I very much enjoyed Folding Idea's latest video, an interpretative discussion/cinematography flex about James Rolfe aka Angry Video Game Nerd. Anyone treating the history of the internet with the depth it contains, as a culture & medium unto itself, is gonna get a win in my book.

It also hit on a point I find myself always coming back to in cultural history; how often people confuse chronology & causation. The Angry Video Game nerd is, of course, one of the most influential "Youtubers" to ever exist, by virtue of being one of the first ever do, in video format, media reviews via a comedic lens. There are years where you can say he was the center of the whole genre. He inspired legions of imitators, some incredibly directly referencing him in their identity, and when you talk to a ~30 year old online creator today who does things adjacent to that space, you can bet good money they watched AVGN when they were a teen.

(I didn't - my stereotypical influence is the Red Letter Media Prequel Reviews)

But is he that influential? Depends on your meaning, of course. Because when you ask people what that influence is, they say something like "pioneering comedic, caustic, hyperbolic review video essays". Which, he did, but he invented none of those parts. As the above video outlines, caustic, exaggerated reviews of media have been around for about as long as reviews have existed as a consumer product; making them entertaining for their own sake is an incredibly logical leap to take. AVGN was coming around in a time where slapstick violence and faux-rage was entirely the vibe of the internet; Penny Arcade had been doing its thing for over half a decade before AVGN's first video was published.

And more importantly, video content in those days was obviously going to lean towards things like comedy and "skit" styles compared to say text reviews, because it complemented the medium better. It takes a lot of niche craft to make a rage speech pop on text; it's much more accessible to just be a good actor and be visibly raging. Going even more downstream, the "media mix" of people consuming content about the art they like or engage with was so old hat by the 2000's that consumer brands were using it as fucking jargon in marketing meetings. There isn't a world where this kind of content would not have appeared. It had to, the culture demanded it.

This is no grand dig at AVGN of course - this is to some extent true of all artists. As Olsen's video notes, what set AVGN apart was that James Rolfe was not a game reviewer; he was a filmographer, he had gone to film school, he was trying to make movies. Which in 2004 meant that he had a ton of cameras and lighting and equipment to make viable content in a way others did not. He had a technological advantage in exploring a new medium, one that would fade as webcams and lighting rings became as cheap as dirt, or shift as markets for crazy stuff like vtuber rigs would evolve. And of course the specific way he went about his content did imprint itself on the medium.

But not thaaat much; I think time has not been kind to AVGN. The humor is of course dated to its time, the MTV's Jackass of video game reviews. And as the medium of self-published video essays has evolved, the medium discovered approaches far better than comedic skit shows. Much longer content is possible, you can ride on parasociality and authenticity instead of endless "joke moments" (Or go the reverse - every comedy video from the old days is too long, a tiktok-level joke stretched over 5 minutes). Some of this was tech dependent as well, of course - youtube had duration limits on uploads in 2005! Making 4 hour Star Wars Hotel videos was not possible outside of stringing "Part 1 of 37" video playlists together. But time and culture marches on as well, and I don't think the average creator today is pulling from 2005 Youtube much at all, really. They are different eras.

As mentioned, if you ever deal with doing causation in cultural history, you run into this all the time - people essentially going "work X was first, and therefore invented the genre and influenced all after". And I don't think it really works that way - establishing causation just takes far more detail than that.

[grumpycurbur]

i'm just gonna leave this here... CW!!!!! my advice is unfollow/block me if any of the following upsets u, i'll know there's no mind changing that can happen...

At this point… i don't fucking care anymore… I REALLY FUCKING DON'T! Times HAVE Changed…

i've been on here for a few years, but i felt like i wasn't allowed to express how I REALLY WANTED TO FEEL about alot of things because i know i wouldn't be on here if i did. so i'll put it here…

I don't think drag queens should be representing stuff meant for CHILDREN!(like Care Bears and "drag queen story hour") I don't think LGBTQ+ should be persistently and insistently pushed/inserted onto content that's always originally been meant for CHILDREN!!!(Like CARE BEARS!(and it's not just care bears btw believe it or not)) Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer; What the fuck do you think that stands for?????

You can't look at me with a straight face and tell me, "trans lives matter" WHEN I DO KNOW MINORS ACROSS THE WORLD ARE GENUINELY SUFFERING FROM GENDER DYSPHORIA!(individuals confused about their "gender identity") it's messed up. IT REALLY IS! Sadly alot of people have been manipulated to genuinely believe that if they're born a man (parts n all), they're REALLY A WOMAN because their "feelings" told them so… ("pronouns" play a part in it) There are generally 2 sides to arguments like this where people say "think about the children"… I don't think YOU KNOW what that means…

it means let kids be kids!!!

it means no matter how subtly you try to phrase it, you PROTECT the INNOCENCE of children's content, not give corporations (even if they DON'T pay attention), ideas how to present certain characters i.e. Superstar Bear is Non-Binary, or Funshine is Transgender (it was a marketing decision back in the early 2000's, i doubt they ACTUALLY sat in an office room and explicitly pushed this idea that Funshine IS IN FACT transgender). (YOU'RE ALLOWED TO THINK WHAT YOU WANT TO THINK BUT PEOPLE SHOULDN'T HAVE TO BE EXPOSED TO IT AND END UP HAVING TO THINK ABOUT IT). Wouldn't you THINK if MINORS are on the internet in general, they PROBABLY shouldn't see "nsfw" themes and ideas unless they're ACTIVELY searching for it? "shudders" i don't care, LGBTQ+ is OVERALL "sexual identification", IT'S NSFW, stop fucking lying about it and trying to distance it from what it ACTUALLY IS with what YOU WANT IT TO BE!

Do i think EVERYONE who's pro-LGBTQ+ is bad??? (Drag is part of it too, please don't lie…)

FUCK. NO!!!!!

i'm aware of "Gays Against Groomers", and respect what they're trying to do, which is to prevent the "inappropriate grooming" of underaged individuals while also being part of the LGBTQ community and embracing their "pride"!

I just think people have been psychologically scarred by the rhetoric that's been pushed and are in many ways mentally destroyed by it and in need of some SERIOUS HELP!

Some might say "get a therapist"; I say, FIND A CONSERVATIVE THERAPIST! Someone who "morally knows" right from wrong. (i know you'll probably think this, but religion is part of all cultures wether you like it or not; rolling your eyes to the back of your head don't help.)

i wish people were more aware of how fucked up WE, as humans, have truly become, but i guess collectively we may never understand what that means and it's a damn shame…

just because you were told as a kid, "you can do whatever you want as an adult and be whatever you want to be", doesn't mean that there is absolutely NO rules, standards OR morals you have to follow.

FIND GOD! FIND SOMEBODY!! JUST…SOMETHING!!!

I GET IT, PEOPLE DON'T WANT TO HEAR "THE OTHER SIDE OF THE STORY" AND CARE SO LITTLE TO WANT TO HEAR IT THAT THEY JUST, don't. maybe it's time to look in the mirror and start to consider the possibility that, maybe, we are all PART OF "THE PROBLEM"… (personal thoughts be damned to hell)

"The Problem", in that, so many people are becoming more and more of an ever-growing, degenerative culture/society that cares SO MUCH about ourselves on an individual basis, that you don't realize that in the end, you don't CARE ABOUT YOURSELVES AT ALL, OR THE FUTURE, OR ANY THING!!! You wanna do/believe things that's odd/weird to others??? Go the fuck right on ahead, BE YOU! Just don't remind the rest of us, unless we (on an individual basis) are curious about it ourselves. sorry if this all sounded "transphobic", idk what else to tell you, it's my opinion, i believe in "free speech", sorry if you don't.

[artstudyes]

I normally don't like to post about politics or what's happening around the world, I know what's happening but I need this little space of the internet to be blissfully unaware of it. A little content warning ⚠️ I'm going to talk about it in the most realistic way possible, if it triggers you don't read it, I'm going to talk about deceased people and the reality of the people of valencia at this moment. So if any of these things aren't your cup of tea I get it, don't read, mental health comes first.

So this is one of the few times I'm breaking that no post policy to speak about what is happening in Valencia, Spain, I'm not from that specific comunidad autónoma but is something that affects all Spain, not just economically, also on personal levels, I know people that has been affected by it and they told us that they were speaking one another to go and be able to identify the corpses of their loved ones, that the death's on the news are way lower that the reality, we have over 2000 missing people. This is a very serious hit to our country, it has passed over night and the governor of valencia is doing a nefarious work in trying to mend it, we had the king and queen, the president of the Spain and the one of the comunidad Valenciana going there and being thrown rocks, and other things,( I would also like to add that people were calling the king and queen everything, that's normally considered treason, but with how people were reacting to them and the fact that with one wrong move we would have the third republic the had to bear with it, not to pity them, just an important fact) because no helping has been able to go there and they are wasting resources and time in cleaning and getting food for the people. We have underground parking that are graveyards, the people of the UME (the Spanish special forces for things like this) are going to need a physiatrist for all they are seeing, the same with normal people. They don't have anything and all because the president of the comunidad Valenciana decided to not listen to Aemet and cutting on the emergency unit a few years ago. If the UME and the people don't clean the streets we are also going to have problems with various quite dangerous virus, like typhus, but the military nor volunteers can access most of the towns nor there are enough people because the president of valencia, doesn't want to accept help from anyone, not form other of the 16 community's or from other countries, France sent 200 firefighters with out permission because we couldn't handle it, and the president of valencia ended up asking for 500 military men and the president of spain sent 5000.

I kind of needed to rant, because we have boxes and boxes full of basic need things, food, clothes... And buses full of volunteers that also aren't being distributed because they don't know how to do it, and they put the wrong people to do the things.

In my page there are a few charity webs that I'll also link, and artists that will do commissions and donate it to Valencia, if you are from Spain and prefer to donate food and other things instead of money, like me, in all big shopping centers there are places to do so, and if you are a college student at least in madrid they are also taking donations to send to Valencia.

Thanks so much for reading all this.

https://www.tumblr.com/artstudyes/766163921086398464?source=share

This is one of the most complete post about everything I could find.

[chiisana-sukima]

follow up to the question you just answered (tho I'm a different anon), when did you first get into fandom? what was it like back in the day?

I read what I would now consider my first fic when I was thirteen. It was split into two traditionally published Star Trek novels, but they were whumptastic, barely sanitized Spirk (no sex, but omg the "Ill die for you, give up everything for you, endure horrible torture, etc" vibes were off the charts). And while I can't say they awakened something in me per se--because I had already read a bunch of other raunchy queer scifi by other authors--they were certainly my first taste of transformative works, and I've been in fandom on and off since I became old enough to drive to cons a few years later.

Why is that romulan chick there when this is sanitized gay porn? No idea, its been years since I read these.

I went to Star Trek cons when I was in my twenties and still know some of the con runners from that time. There were, to put it bluntly, a lot of raves and a lot of sex lol. It was a more open time period in some ways, or at least it was open enough my whole friend group basically all banged.

Otoh though, there wasn't nearly as much language to think and talk about identity. I think The Youth TM have really stepped up around issues of gender and sexuality in ways that are net huge positives, including for older queers who can now identify ourselves in ways that may always have been central to us, but which we didnt have language to express (I still call myself bi and queer but can now also say I'm nonbinary/genderqueer and aro--both of which I have been for as long as I can remember but only have words to discuss now). We banged a lot back then (which was great! no regrets!) but didn't know ourselves very well.

I didn't become what I'd call active in fandom on a regular basis though until the 1990s. I was a manga translator in the late nineties/early 2000s and ran a small scanlation team. There wasn't as much Discourse about what kinds of content are acceptable then as there is now, but Discourse springs eternal, so there were a bunch of other kinds of wank instead. My team was international, and we ended up splitting over a weird mix of factors that included one of the members being incredibly racist due to childhood trauma during the Yugoslav wars, my own anxiety over customs opening all my packages from Japan, and an attempt by a traditional publishing company to co-opt all the scanlators as contractors for shit wages and no benefits.

I took a long break and then came back into fandom on the fic reading/writing side in 2015, and I love it here a lot. AO3 is the best thing since sliced bread. Even though I worry about purity wank and the panopticon and how that's all affecting people growing up now, I think overall fandom is a better place for the togetherness that the internet has bred. It's much more accessible now compared to when I was young, and it's easier to find your own little tribe of weirdos who match your freak pretty exactly.

[gallifreyinstituteforlearning]

Followup on my hypothetical question of whether or not the CIA could find me from my connection to a renegade Time Lord:

Let's say that renegade has somehow managed to evade permanent punishment on Gallifrey for 2000+ years. (random large amount of time from a human perspective) If I've known this renegade for a few months, let's say somewhere around 4-7, how long would it take for the CIA to hypothetically find me?

How long would it take the Celestial Intervention Agency to find someone?

Considering the advanced capabilities of the CIA and the resources at their disposal, it wouldn't take them long to find you. Here's a rough estimate:

Initial Investigation: Within the first few days to a week, the CIA would gather preliminary data and begin scanning for temporal anomalies and symbiotic links.

Targeted Search: If you've been in contact with the renegade for 4-7 months, they could pinpoint your location within a few weeks using their advanced tracking technology and intelligence networks.

Direct Intervention: Depending on the priority level assigned to the renegade, the CIA could deploy agents to your location within a month or two of initiating the search, especially if they have reason to believe the renegade is using you to evade capture.

If the renegade is highly skilled at evading detection and has taken extensive measures to hide their presence, it might extend the timeframe slightly. However, the CIA's persistence and advanced technology would eventually overcome these obstacles.

⚠️ Please Note

Given that the CIA has mastery over time travel, the concept of timeframes is quite funny. The CIA can travel to any point in time to track you, which means they might have already found you before you even asked this question.

🏫 So ...

They already have.

Related:

What technology can the Celestial Intervention Agency use to track someone?: Limited overview on CIA tracking technology.

Does Gallifrey have anyone they've had friendly interactions with?: History of historical alliances Gallifrey have made.

What does the Gallifreyan political and social environment look like?: Overview of the general structure of Gallifreyan society and politics.

Hope that helped! 😃

Any purple text is educated guesswork or theoretical. More content ... →📫Got a question? | 📚Complete list of Q+A and factoids →😆Jokes |🩻Biology |🗨️Language |🕰️Throwbacks |🤓Facts →🫀Gallifreyan Anatomy and Physiology Guide (pending) →⚕️Gallifreyan Emergency Medicine Guides →📝Source list (WIP) →📜Masterpost If you're finding your happy place in this part of the internet, feel free to buy a coffee to help keep our exhausted human conscious. She works full-time in medicine and is so very tired😴

[sitp-recs]

hii! i hope you’re doing well!! i was wondering if you have any long-ish fic recs that are harry-centric? ive been rescind a lot of draco centric fics lately and while i adore those i was hoping a for a bit of change and you have the best taste in fics so i came straight here 😅🌸 thanks in advance

Hi there! Thank you, I’m so happy you enjoy the recs 💜 here are some great Harry-centric long fics, I hope you enjoy:

At the Doorway, On the Stair by dwell_the_brave (T, 30k)

A year after Draco Malfoy goes missing, his mother has one last option—Harry Potter. Having left the Auror department and made a name for himself as a Private Investigator, Harry cannot help but get involved in the disappearance of Draco Malfoy.

Faint Indirections by ignatiustrout (T, 30k)

Draco Malfoy is the last person Harry expects to turn up in Boston, Massachussetts. But now he's here, and he won't stop requesting books from the library where Harry works.

On Your Shore by @xanthippe74 (M, 35k)

Clearing out a remote house full of cursed collectibles in the Outer Hebrides? Not a problem for an experienced curse breaker like Harry Potter. Spending a week with the straight, happily-married man that he’s starting to have feelings for? And sharing a bed with him at night? Surely Harry can handle that, too.

Rush (For A Gap That Exists) by @sleepstxtic-drarry (M, 42k)

A story of love and loss that grew amidst the most infamous rivalry in Formula One history: the story of Draco Malfoy and Harry Potter.

Blood and Fire by @lqtraintracks (E, 45k)

Harry has spent the last twelve years in Romania, not returning to England as often as he knows he should. It's complicated. But when Ginny asks him to be her best man and help her plan her wedding, he can't say no.

The Way We Wind by @thesleepiesthufflepuff (E, 45k)

After the war, Harry’s life falls to shambles. Each day revolves around an intense battle with his mental health, and there’s nothing that Ron or Hermione can do to help him.

fly like paper, high like planes by @harryromper (M, 47k)

Harry Potter, Head Coach of the Appleby Arrows, is very content leading a quiet life. He has a doddery old house-elf who makes his breakfast, a team of players who love Quidditch almost as much as he does, and a Kneazle that curls against his damaged leg at the foot of his bed at night.

Crossing Lines by Ren (E, 48k)

While investigating a ring of smugglers, the Aurors receive a tip saying that the European Express is being used to move contraband across state lines. To solve the case, Harry has to unmask the smugglers and find the hidden contraband before the luxury train reaches Bulgaria.

Here's The Pencil, Make It Work by ignatiustrout (M, 49k)

Harry thinks "Why is Malfoy working in a coffee shop in muggle London?" is a much simpler question than, "Are you going to accept that auror offer and, if you don't, what will you do?"

I Won't Let You Fall Apart by @xanthippe74 (M, 50k)

Harry has spent the year after the war staying out of the public eye, dodging political battles, and standing firm against pressure from his friends. But he has a secret plan to get away from it all. He just needs to testify at one more Death Eater trial: Draco Malfoy’s.

New Message by @m0srael (T, 58k)

Harry Potter has a crush on his roommate--like, a BIG one--but he can't say anything to him, can he?! Naturally, he does what any early 2000s young adult would do and asks the internet for help, and gets a lot more back than he expected.

Modern Love by @tackytigerfic (E, 61k)

Harry Potter, of all people, knows that life isn’t always fair. And no one gets to be happy all of the time. But surely there’s something more—something better—than a rubbish Ministry job, and a lonely old house, and that feeling that everyone out there is doing a better job of living than Harry is.

The Beauty of Thestrals and Other Unseen Things by @writcraft (E, 63k)

Harry has terrific friends, an amazing girlfriend and his job as Head Auror enables him to work on challenging cases and Ministry reform. He just wishes he could work out why he’s been so out of sorts.

The Promise of Summer by Omi_Ohmy (M, 66k)

How was Harry supposed to know that coming back for eighth year would be so confusing? Everything is the same, and yet not the same. And nowhere is this more obvious than with Draco Malfoy.

Crown Witness by @slytherco (E, 70k)

After the war, wizarding society is oppressed by a new kind of plague—an organised crime group calling itself the Family. When Harry Potter goes to interrogate a potential witness, he doesn’t expect to end up on the run again, trying to keep Draco Malfoy alive, while a manhunt follows in their footsteps, adamant on eliminating the one witness that could ruin everything.

Little Deaths and How to Avoid Them (or Draco Malfoy's Guide to Stop Dying and Start Living Instead) by nerakrose (T, 96k)

Malfoy is way too interested in coroner reports for somebody who's definitely not looking for ways to die, Harry wants to be friends with him, and Ginny wants to break up with Harry.

Pages of You by @wolfpants (E, 101k)

Summer, 1980. Harry is floating between university and becoming a Real Certified Adult. He's not ready. He really isn't. In a desperate attempt to have the Best Last Summer ever, he takes a casual job at his godfather's bookshop in London, starts an illicit pen pal affair with a wordy posh boy that he's catching feelings for, all while dealing with the son of Sirius's business rival, one Draco Malfoy, insufferable know-it-all extraordinaire.

Make Yourself by AnyaElizabeth (E, 103k)

Harry just wants to be safe within the freshly painted walls of Grimmauld Place, with his friends around him. But when he hears Draco Malfoy has been spotted at the local soup kitchen, he can't help but encourage a different type of stray to come under his roof.

By the Grace by lettered (T, 140k)

Harry is an Auror instructor. Malfoy wants to be an Auror.

where all the veins meet by eight_of_wands (E, 146k)

It's the summer of 1998. The battle is over, and Voldemort is dead, but Harry still has more questions than answers. Who is he without a piece of Voldemort's soul in his head? What is he supposed to do now? His friends try to help, but the only thing that can hold his attention—one of the only things that ever has—is Draco Malfoy, out on parole and weirdly hanging around the British Museum.

[saintsenara]

I always love hearing about people’s fandom and reading/writer journeys especially since they usually involve some very cursed content and fun navigating ‘90’s and ‘00’s tech. Where did you start, what got you hooked, how have your tastes changed over the years, what made you decide to go from reader to writer? 💖

thank you for the ask, anon - and you’re correct that my experience was one of cursed 2000s technology, given that i started reading harry potter fanfiction via the twin madhouses of livejournal and fictionalley - nothing ever tagged beyond "lemon!!!1!" - on the family computer using dial-up internet.

[god bless the fact that the parents of my generation had no inclination to care about what we were consuming online - one of my brothers was a huge fan of rotten.com, and he's perfectly well-adjusted...]

my reading tastes were, initially, lord of the rings focused - i still think* about a particular elrohir/námo mandos fic which had me in chokehold when i was about fourteen - but i was as big a harry potter fan as anyone of my generation [shoutout in particular to one of my pals, who spent the entirety of a geography trip in 2006 speculating what the unknown horcruxes could be with me while we froze our bollocks off in some godforsaken bog in county antrim]. so it wasn’t a surprise, i suppose, that i was clicking on any fanfiction links i could find for that series too…

[the fic which has stayed with me most profoundly from those days was called something along the lines of murder at malfoy manor. it was on fictionalley and was this exceptional combination of the rules of cluedo and the ron-is-time-travelling dumbledore theory. it was incredible.]

but i wasn’t a writer. i was one of those science-y, not-like-other-girls teenagers who was performatively really cunty about other girls who liked to write little stories or draw little pictures, which i thought was fundamentally unserious. the fact that i was an avid consumer of these stories didn’t make me question what the fuck i was being such an arsehole about…

because i loved a bit of fanfic, and not only did i love fanfic but i demonstrably had a fandom presence and was clued up on fandom lore - i could quote my immortal, i knew what a snape-wife was, i was on a forum or two - although i went to great lengths to avoid anyone in my real life discovering that. and i do feel extremely proud of myself that i have a reputation among people i know for not having been particularly cringe as a teen [how little they know… i’ve just got a good poker face.]

i lost interest in harry potter when i went to university - i started uni in 2010, when it was still socially acceptable to be really into it, and i definitely went to my fair share of themed parties in the first couple of years, but by the time i graduated in 2016 [i did medicine, so it’s a six-year slog] i’d not opened the books, watched the films, or thought about the fandom in years. i remember rolling my eyes at the number of people i know who went to see cursed child when it first opened. bit cringe to be in your twenties and into harry potter, isn’t it?

[lol. lmao.]

but a global crisis changes things, i suppose.

like so many people, i got back into fandom during the coronavirus pandemic - although, regrettably, not because i was stuck in the house. i don’t think i’ll ever be able to accurately describe what it was like to work in a hospital in 2020, except to say that by the time i got home each day the only thing i could do other than stare blankly at a wall was lose myself in the comfort of media i knew well and its memories of a simpler time. and once i’d re-read the books a few times… well, it was only a matter of time before i was scrolling ao3 at 3am.

and, because my ego hasn’t changed even if my relationship with my own gender has, it did not take a lot to convince me that i could write stories which were just as good as the ones i was reading.

you can be the judge of whether i succeeded.

[*i’m being coy. i have it bookmarked on ao3]

[blizzardsuplex]

“like watching art in motion” (an essay on ZSJ and wrestling)

CW: discussions of gatekeeping

I didn’t have internet for over three days, and so in my total boredom I opened up my Microsoft Word and began tinkering with a “casual essay” on my favorite wrestler, Zack Sabre Jr. But I can’t talk about Zack without talking about how I feel about and my experiences with pro wrestling as a whole, so over 3.2k words later, here we are.

(I didn’t mean it to get so long...nor, in truth, get so personal. I’ve been carrying this with me for a long time, though, so I guess it had to come out eventually. Things like that always do.)

Title from a comment I saw on Reddit about Zack in 2016. Content under the cut. Special thanks to @heartsinablender/Izzy, who encouraged me to write and eventually post this in semi-public. :)

~~~~

My absolute earliest memories of professional wrestling are of reading next to my favorite uncle while he watched early to mid-2000s era Smackdown on one of those old, boxy TVs, but my first formative memory related to it is talking to one of my classmates, an enthusiastic prowres fan in the way children can be, on the stands by the soccer field during P.E. I don’t remember how the conversation started, but eventually (as it usually did) it landed on the object of his interest.

“I watch wrestling, sometimes,” I threw out, having at that point probably paid attention to a grand total of less than an hour of WWE. His eyes grew wide, then narrowed.

“Yeah?” he said. “Name ten wrestlers.”

He’d said it in a way that felt final, like he was sure that I wouldn’t be able to answer his challenge. It lit a fire under me, and I said “The Undertaker” as quick as a slap. He was unfazed, however, and all too soon I faltered: “The Great Khali, John Cena, Triple H, Booker T…uh. The Great Khali—“

“You said him twice,” my classmate said smugly. He turned away from me, back to the soccer game.

I don’t remember what I replied to the side of his face or what I did immediately after; it didn’t matter. I’d already failed the test, and no matter how biased its giver was, the fact I’d proven him right sucked.

~~~~

This is an essay about how I feel about the professional wrestler Zack Sabre Jr. This is also, if the above hasn’t clued you in, an essay about my personal history and relationship with professional wrestling. These ideas are not only closely related but intertwined, two vines. As with anything alive, both have their periods of growth and withering, fecundity and barrenness, somewhat independent of each other but in the end—as with any ecosystem—affecting the very same, sometimes in dramatic ways.

But even the strongest vines need something to wrap around if they ever hope to reach the sun. Where did these find their base?—my very body, frail as it is compared to the kinds of people who take up the path of the wrestler. That’s the funny thing about entertainment, I’ve found: the people you watch, whether on stage or in ring or on a screen, seem like invincible titans…as long as you’re watching them. The minute you turn your eyes away, they start to wilt; when you turn your back, they wither. With enough lack of care (in every sense), anyone could tear off the leaves and stems and just leave.

I could leave. I’ve almost left. Certainly I’ve drifted away from it on occasion. But so far I’ve always come back, or maybe more precisely I’ve let those vines wind and wind and wind ‘round me again, and more often than not ZSJ—what he represents to my conception of wrestling—is to blame.

~~~~

After I had tried and failed at the task of naming ten wrestlers, I remember feeling embarrassed. Now—though for a completely different reason—I feel outright ashamed. Now, I know too intimately what eight-year-old me could only barely comprehend: why he had issued that challenge in the first place. I was a girl, and I was an unathletic twig, and I was the most bookish of nerds, and while one or even two of those traits might have been acceptable in a “real fan”…all three of those things? Never. A classic example of gatekeeping—and for a while mentally that one interaction was successful at keeping me out.

But at the time it was “just” embarrassment, and as much as I hate to admit it that feeling followed me even after I began actually watching WWE with my uncle and cousin. Dipping your toes into any new activity or hobby, especially one with the amount of layers pro wrestling does, is daunting enough without the constant fear of somehow being discovered and kicked out of that space before my time, though of course my family wouldn’t do that—or, worse, laughed at, which they might’ve. The fact that my cousin was a year younger than me but, at least at first, knew more than I did didn’t really help: she never gatekept, but how she took every chair shot and dick kick we watched in stride (it was during Christian’s feud with Randy Orton) while I was left scratching my head a bit made me feel, as with my classmate, like a poser.

Well, I didn’t want to be a poser anymore, so I went to that great well of information: the internet. Specifically, I went on TV Tropes (yeah, I know) and read the pages on professional wrestling and WWE; while I was aware that there were other promotions, especially after reading the former—I remember the promotion name Ring of Honor getting a cool! from me—I wasn’t interested in anything but the “basics” at that point. What was a heel, a face, a tweener? What did it mean when someone did a shoot on another? What even was the Attitude Era, and why did people like it so much (a question that to this day I’m not sure I can answer)?

I got those down in a reasonable amount of time. Then, something interesting began to happen: I felt compelled to keep reading more about it. I honestly don’t remember the specifics—which names, memes, and tragedies (always in a WWF/WWE context) my brain absorbed like a sponge. All I know is that, after a couple of months, I ended up quite a bit like a smark. So I did get what I wanted: no longer did I feel like a fake fan, even if it came at the cost of somewhat alienating my cousin (who was beginning to lose interest in wrestling) and my uncle.

That wasn’t the most interesting thing I got out of my wiki walking days, though. Because of my (in truth middling-depth) dive into (a very narrow slice of) the prowres ocean, 12 to 13-year-old me thought I had figured this whole professional wrestling thing out: it was bright, it was flashy, it was written like a soap opera. It was entertaining, sometimes off of sheer cringe-inducing antics and sometimes out of sheer spectacle. What counted as spectacle, meanwhile?—the flippiest of flips, dramatic kickouts, muscled people billed at two whole feet taller than me hollering at each other in the ring. It was violent (but not too much, for the sponsors’ sake) and it was slickly produced and it had the best kind of nonsensical internal logic.

Of course, that is what wrestling is…sometimes. There’s nothing wrong with that, or anything wrong with watching wrestling like that, either. My mistake as a child was putting it in a box, thinking that everything I just said was everything it could and can be. I was lukewarm on the idea of prowres presented more sport-like, didn’t know how it could be entertaining without a writer’s room’s worth of storylines. As for pro wrestling being art, or even just beautiful—those two concepts seemed so far apart that to use the word never even crossed my mind.

~~~~

So stayed my thoughts on it until, when I was maybe 13 or 14, I fell head-first into hipsterdom (in the “wanting to like things before they were cool” sense). It happened with music, it happened with video games, and it happened with wrestling. Though I still watched WWE, I began to look beyond its borders—which is to say I began paying attention to trope examples by wrestlers I wasn’t familiar with. Those entries, along with a few well-placed links to 240p YouTube videos, were how I found my first favorite wrestler…who was, of all people, Chuck Taylor (who I still love, don’t get me wrong).

But wrestling news moves fast—even faster than the editors at early 2010s TV Tropes, and especially those editors who cared about keeping an independent wrestler’s page up to date. I knew that, if I wanted to know more about Chuckie T and his Gentleman’s Club, I would have to look elsewhere.

I found two places: a wrestling forum literally just called Wrestling Forum, and a newish subreddit called /r/squaredcircle. I proceeded to lurk on both, but it was on Reddit a year or so later that I found the post that ended up being the catalyst for my wrestling fandom from that point forward—a mention that Chuck Taylor wrestled at this supposedly really cool promotion called Pro Wrestling Guerrilla during their yearly Battle of Los Angeles, and that the footage of that show was finally out.

I don’t know when I found the time to look for it. When I think back to that Saturday afternoon, navigating with no adblock to a sketchy wrestling stream archive on a desktop already considered ancient, all I remember is how curious I was when—after giving it a couple of minutes to buffer—I finally pressed play.

~~~~

The match, if you want to find it yourself, is the Friends of Low Moral Fiber (Kenny Omega, Chuck Taylor, and Zack Sabre Jr.) versus the Young Bucks and Adam Cole from BOLA 2014 Night 1. Back then, every single one of those names were established or rising players in the independent scene; now, of course, they’ve all been in multiple top-level promotions around the world. For this and several other reasons, I haven’t been able to watch that contest back before, just last year, I found it in its entirety on YouTube. The channel quickly got taken down, but not before I snagged a copy for myself; in fact, I made the effort to get it as soon as I saw it was the real deal. As someone once told me, pro wrestling is one of the most ephemeral of entertainment forms—and also I don’t have the money for both a DVD player and to ship from the US to watch it legitimately.

But I wasn’t thinking about that when I was 14 or 15 years old. At the time, the only person I really knew or cared about in that match was Chuck, and so as the introductions happened I eagerly awaited his time in the ring (even back then, I held the opinion that he was an underrated worker). Instead, his team first fielded the skinny man with the Union Jack jacket, the one who’d gotten right into the other side’s faces. Zack Sabre Jr., I recalled as everyone got into their corners. A cool name, if a little overwrought.

The bell rang. Twenty-four minutes later, I paused the video and spent hours searching that “overwrought” name everywhere, looking for more clips of him, more discussion on him—more of his wrestling.

~~~~

What can I say about Zack Sabre Jr. in the context of wrestling that probably hasn’t already been said a million times? He has an atypical build for a wrestler, especially before his recent bulk up: tall but very lean—or outright skinny if you’re feeling uncharitable. His promo style is one I have seen called “extremely British” and “hilariously unhinged” (which, considering everything happening in the UK, maybe mean the same thing). He has some pretty sick taste in indie entrance themes. And, of course, he is considered one of the best technical wrestlers in the world—maybe of all time, and certainly in this generation.

To me, though, he is (simply, encompassingly) my favorite wrestler, and upon watching that BOLA match back it isn’t necessarily because I was wowed by the smoothness of his technique (though I was) or impressed by his underrated speed (though I was) or even in awe of his flexibility (though I definitely was—and here I shout out Adam Cole for helping make Zack’s first in-ring impression such a memorable one). No; it was because, for the very first time, I realized professional wrestling wasn’t cut and dry, contained within the box I had tried to place it in.

Read what I described my younger self’s conception of prowres to be…or, if you prefer, think back to the height of PG era WWE. To my mind, wrestling was supposed to almost overwhelm, saturate the senses. Wrestling was bright, flashy, melodramatic, violent—loud.

The footage I watched that day was loud, too; even through the shitty speakers and video quality, it was clear that the Reseda faithful knew how to have a good fucking time. But whenever Zack was in the ring, it was quiet—sometimes literally, but I more mean in movement, in intent. He convinced me from the first lock up that he was absolutely focused on how he could twist his body and how he could turn his opponent’s, that he aware of and could manipulate every single joint and muscle and ligament offered to him. He convinced me that it was, at that moment, all he cared about. It was still violence, of course; all his graceful movements were in service of hurting another. But it was an elegant violence, a quiet violence.

Pro wrestling, the profession of machismo and posturing, could be quiet. Who knew? Before I saw Zack wrestle, I didn’t, and nor did I ever consider the logical question to ask after: if it could be quiet—the complete opposite of what I thought it was—what else was it? What else might it become?

Beautiful, maybe?

I didn’t know then and I don’t know now. Whether wrestling is art is a discussion I leave to people with far more time and far more knowledge of aesthetics than I do. What I do know is this: I not only put it in the wrong box, I was wrong to put it in a box. Professional wrestling is no dead thing, no solved problem—it was, and is, alive, and at its best exists as a creative medium with so many possibilities. Sure, we all have our preferences, and prowres has space for loudness, almost deafening; but it has space for the quiet as well.

~~~~

It would be one thing if ZSJ was a flash in the pan, someone who rose in the business just far enough to get a handful of PWG bookings before fizzling out. If that were the case, I suppose I could expound on the point about prowres being ephemeral, say something that would amount to “the world may have moved on from him, but I’ll never forget how he opened my eyes all those years ago”. But that would be both extremely disingenuous and, to be honest, make a worse narrative. That one match made me understand wrestling more; following Zack’s career afterwards made me love it.

A not insignificant part to this is the fact I hitched my cart to a damn good horse—if Zack was good in 2014, he got even better as the years went by. While he was always a joy to see work, once he improved at selling in particular (which I never thought he was horrible at, mind, but watching early tapes back you can tell the difference), his matches went from baseline good to great; who doesn’t enjoy watching ZSJ crumple and ragdoll around the ring these days? Yet another big reason I am genuinely grateful for his wrestling is far beyond him: ZSJ was my passport to the rest of the wrestling world. Through him, I discovered so many promotions, so many other amazing wrestlers. There was PWG, of course—tying Mike Bailey into knots in the finals of a BOLA, making Chris Hero’s finger bleed, going to war with Roderick Strong over the belt. There was him countering Will Ospreay’s top rope move into a triangle choke that one Wrestlemania weekend. It was him who put me on to European wrestling, with WxW and RevPro and everyone else. His fight with Negro Casas was the first time I’d seen a mat-based lucha match. And, of course, without him I wouldn’t have started watching New Japan, and without New Japan I would’ve never seen any of the amazing people that make up the puro and/or joshi scene.

I always, always come back to Zack himself, though, it’s true. And maybe, some might suggest, it’s at least partly out of a mix of nostalgia and novelty—he was the first wrestler I paid attention to that looked different and wrestled different from what I considered the norm. When I’m put in a hyperfocused trance by the quiet of his matches, past and present, perhaps it’s just my subconscious, somehow, paying respect to how he made that young teen feel.

My answer to that is…well, maybe a little. But ZSJ doesn’t coast by on that alone—he is continually improving, continually striving to improve, and I couldn’t be happier that he’s getting his due. And, like with professional wrestling itself, I find happiness in that match from 2014 (almost a decade ago, now!) not only out of a sense of nostalgia, or even its own sake, but because it’s proof of what Zack Sabre Jr. was and has now become.

~~~~

A trio of ZSJ-related anecdotes to round things off:

1.) When I was in late high school, I did a school project on professional wrestling. The local guy I interviewed was honestly pretty gracious, but something he said nagged at me. “Pro wrestling,” he tried to explain to me, even before I said anything about what I watched, “isn’t just like WWE.” I know, I wanted to reply. My favorite wrestler is Zack Sabre Jr. I watch mostly American indies. Why are you assuming that I don’t know that?—but it would have come across indignant, and so I held my tongue.

2.) A few months later, I wrote a post on Facebook on why I liked pro wrestling, inspired by my discovery of Barthes’ essay on it in his Mythologies. My old classmate, the one who gatekept me when we were both eight, saw it—and he not only liked it, not only commented positively on it, but even DMed me. “Who’s your favorite wrestler?” he asked me. “Zack Sabre Jr.,” I said. He then proceeded to approve, saying that he was great in the Cruiserweight Classic; he was then surprised when I said I’d been following his career for a while even before that.

3.) When my older sister and I were in the women’s section of the Tokyo Dome during Wrestle Kingdom 14 Night 1, we ended up sitting next to and chatting with an Australian lady who got into NJPW because of her boyfriend (they both really liked Ospreay). When ZSJ came down to the ring, I heard her say encouragingly to me “that’s your Zack”. I’m not sure if I’d ever say he’s mine, but that was the night, maybe even the moment, that the very beginnings of this essay were born: when I realized how much he’d influenced at least this part of my life. Suddenly, I wanted nothing more than to jump down fifteen rows of seats and shake his hand, tell him even a little what his performances meant to me.

But that was not the time for that; three years later I still haven’t found the time for it, living where I do. Instead, I ended up, and end up, just sitting in my chair, screaming wordlessly at the top of my lungs, and watching him wrestle.

[aristidetwain]

Jenny and the Gang: An Interview With Joe Macaré & Nelson Evergreen

Today, October 24th, 2023, marks the 21st anniversary of Name’s Not Down, commonly regarded as the first completed Jenny Everywhere comic story. The work of Joe Macaré and Nelson Evergreen, it was formally released into the public domain on Jenny Everywhere Day last year alongside its sequel, Damn Fine Hostile Takeover, at my own instigation.

Having managed to track down both of these highly esteemed creators — long since departed from the Jenny Everywhere community — it was then my duty and my very great pleasure to conduct the first-ever joint Jenny-centric interview of two of the honoured few who shaped the character in her infancy.

Goggles on! Shift to Interviewspace in three… two… one…

How would you introduce yourselves to Jenny Everywhere readers?

Joe: My name is Joe Macaré (he/him), and I was raised in the Midlands (UK) and now live in the Midwest (US). I work in fundraising and communications, currently for a LGBT+ rights advocacy organization.

Nelson: I’m Neil Evans, a Welsh illustrator and comic artist occasionally going by the pseudonym Nelson Evergreen. I moved back to my hometown of Wrexham, North Wales in 2017, after twenty merry years in Brighton on the south coast of England. Illustration work this year includes a version of George Orwell’s 1984 (Oxford University Press), an anthology of weird — and often terrifying — Christmas folklore from around the globe (Cider Mill Press) and a 72 page graphic novel detailing the life of Mamie Phipps Clarke, the psychologist and activist whose research with her husband Kenneth was key to the abolition of racial segregation in US schools (Magination Press).  Between jobs I’m busy with various ongoing personal labours of love, a couple of which are, after years of agonisingly glacial/troubled development, tantalisingly close to shareable. You can find me at neil-evans.net!

How did you originally learn about Jenny, and what led to your creating full comics starring the character? If those are different questions, what did you/do you like about the character — was it the open-source nature of the project? The appeal of Jenny herself as a protagonist? Something else?

J: I was active on the Barbelith message board from 2000-200something; closer to the truth to say that around the time Jenny Everywhere was created I was deeply, deeply enmeshed on that forum and in that community. It was my first internet “home” and so it’s probably accurate to say that I was initially drawn to the character because it was a Barbelith creative project and therefore something I wanted to be a part of.  But also, when Steven “Moriarty” Wintle drew that first sketch, it definitely popped. Jenny, especially with the paragraph description attached, seemed like someone I knew, or someone I would like to know. An idealized avatar in some ways, but a plausible person in others.

N: I found Barbelith not long after I began “boxsetting” The Invisibles (very belatedly, it was close to the end of the comic’s run), and got quite addicted to the forum. It was a good place.  I’d been messing about making music in bands for a few years, neglecting the illustration/comic side of things, and wanted to get back into drawing… and Barbelith happened to have lots of folk who were very good with words. So I posted a few pieces of work and asked if anyone had any comic scripts they wanted drawn, and I’m guessing Moriarty/Steven’s Jenny thread must have appeared at around that time or very shortly after..? Joe and I had certainly already touched on the idea of working together, so when Jenny appeared I think we just took it as read that that was “the one”.  With Jenny, the initial appeal for me was the very unique nature of her potential: the dozens/hundreds/thousands of different ways the character could go, depending on who’s working with her. Also, I’m generally quite content in my own company - god knows, you have to be when you’re illustrating comics - but I loved the online hubbub around her at that time. There was something really… *cosy* about knowing others were working on their own versions of this character. So that was another huge part of the appeal, that sense of community.

Even though the multiversal gimmick is one of the first things people hear about Jenny, neither Name's Not Down nor Damn Fine Hostile Takeover make any direct reference to it. Was this a conscious choice, and if so, what motivated it?

J: For my part it was a conscious choice and it had a lot to do with the kind of comics I was reading at the time and being influenced by. At the time, complicated continuities and parallel universes seemed like slightly embarrassing excesses that characterized Marvel/DC superhero comics. They were prog rock, and were being challenged by a new wave of what Oni Press called “real mainstream” indie comics. Punchy, punky, often black & white, and very self-consciously influenced more by movies, TV, and music than by superhero comics. You could put fantastical elements in there but nothing that demanded a long explanation. Now, not only did the idea of making comics without multiverses become the mainstream, so that they were more like movies and TV, turn out to be onto a losing proposition and *the exact opposite of what happened,* for better or worse, but half the star writers and comics “thinkers” of the time later turned out to be predatory creeps. Whoops! But at the time, this was the cultural scene that shaped what I wanted to write. A comic you wouldn’t be embarrassed to be seen reading at the zine fair or dance party. Of course, goody nerd that I’ve always been, I couldn’t help but include Smallville references, so any attempt to be consciously cool was always somewhat doomed.

Were there any interesting, non-obvious inspirations or references baked into these stories, that you'd like to share? 

J: Oh god, sometimes I think those scripts were nothing *but* references and it’s quite possible I’ve forgotten some of them now. I mean I’d be very embarrassed by all the Smallville references were it not for the fact that I remember that in the UK, the show was aired in the Sunday morning block which made it perfect hangover television.  Clea was named after Clea Duvall. Bradley was named the somewhat obscure 2000 AD character. I think the most obscure influence/reference is having the character Lex, who considers himself a charmer, always introduce himself by saying “Greetings!” That’s a reference to eldest son Joey in the late 1980s BBC comedy series, Bread. That one was probably only noticed by other British people my age who grew up relating greatly to a show about a working class family with an absent father who constantly worried about money. The television I watched as a kid also led to me choosing Apollo Coffee as the name of the Starbucks stand-in, Starbuck and Apollo being a reference to the original Battlestar Galactica (the reboot had not yet come along!). “Damn Fine Hostile Takeover” is obviously extremely far from a serious piece of political polemic, but I do remember consciously wanting to introduce at least a small flavor of agitprop, compared to “Name’s Not Down” which is mostly just a power fantasy about beating up needlessly aggressive doormen to get into a club. The early political “analysis” I had at the time, which didn’t go much beyond big corporate chains being bad and small local independent coffee shops being good, was obviously influenced by stuff like Naomi Klein’s No Logo. And a sort of bastardized pop culture version of that, that had showed up in things like Grant Morrison’s Marvel Boy. Oh, and a misunderstood El-P lyric. Speaking of Morrison, as befits a character created on Barbelith, that approach of “shove in references to everything you’re inspired by, watching, reading, or listening to at the particular moment you’re writing the comic” was very much inspired by Morrison in general and The Invisibles in particular. Although the Morrison comic I was most trying to emulate, at least in “Name’s Not Down” was Kill Your Boyfriend. But also, the whole reason I set those comics in a thinly fictionalized version of Brighton is because at the time, I was living in London and knew a bunch of people in Brighton (again, many of them through Barbelith, or adjacent to people I’d met via that place). They all seemed very impressive and cool to me at the time: people who put on club nights (It Came From The Sea), wrote about music (Careless Talk Costs Lives / Plan B), or on whom I just had a really big crush. I would take the train down to Brighton many weekends and it loomed large in my imagination. Although there’s no evidence of this on Google, I did not invent calling it “Right-On”: that’s another thing I stole or borrowed and can’t remember from whom or where.

How detailed were the scripts/how much freedom was there on the art end of things? Did you start from a synopsis, or a script, or a storyboard? Are there any notable ways in which the finished works differed from the original outline?

N: I can’t refer to them because I lost my copies in a hard drive calamity a couple of years later, but I remember being struck by how full of gusto and enthusiasm Joe’s scripts were. They really got me fired up to draw. The stage directions had the same infectious energy as the dialogue. I get some quite perfunctory scripts in my line of work — and that’s fine — but I do appreciate the ones that go above and beyond.  I think I’m right in recalling the scripts as being very precise..? Joe had a very clear idea of the pacing, and how the story and gags would flow from panel to panel. The dialogue was all there from the start. I remember reading through and immediately getting a clear mental picture of how it was all going to look. It was very tightly scripted but not in a way that felt restrictive, it was very free and easy to illustrate. And it gave me plenty of leeway to come up with hordes of characters/creatures in those big ensemble panels.

J: I no longer have the scripts so I’m going from memory, but: I wrote pretty detailed scripts but I definitely had panels or entire pages where I encouraged Nelson Evergreen to cut loose and add whatever details and weird characters sprang to his mind. This is as good a place as any to state that I got phenomenally lucky when Nelson agreed to collaborate. Of all the artists who were kicking around Barbelith at the time and who were at all interested in the project, he was perhaps the most talented and I certainly can’t imagine anyone else who would have drawn those comics as well, or that they would have been received as warmly had they been drawn by anyone else.

A mysterious bald man makes conspicuous cameos in both of your long-form Jenny comics. What's the significance of this character? Some of us in the Jenny Everywhere Discord suggested he might have been meant to be Grant Morrison themself, owing to the focus of the forum on which Jenny originally appeared; short of that, we have no idea… 

N: I *think* he was my addition, but again, without having the scripts to hand, my memory may be playing tricks on me. I mean, he *looks* like the sort of thing I’d have thrown in! I’ve always enjoyed the sight of one lone person looking utterly severe/unimpressed in the midst of general merriment, and I’m guessing I improvised MBM in one panel, he made me laugh, so I put him in another, and then another. Dave, the keyboard player in my band at the time, had that exact t-shirt, with the “Guides” logo, which he wore all the bloody time, and that must have seemed to me like the perfect outfit. So yeah, just a silly little running visual thing I threw in off the cuff to amuse myself really. Looking back at if from a distance, he *does* look quite significant, doesn’t he? Sorry! I feel like a right troll. 

You've stated in the past that you included the Jenny Nowhere cliffhanger in Damn Fine Hostile Takeover without a conscious plan for what that story might be about — but did you ever have any plans for further Jenny stories that didn't materialise? If so, what were they about? And if you had to write the Nowhere story, what might it be like?

J: The only idea I remember from “The Two Jennys” was that Jenny Nowhere would have made her base of operations the Right-On version of the ruined West Pier (the real world version of which in Brighton is now even more skeletal and not practical for even the most doomer supervillain to use as a hideout). I think it would have culminated in a Quadrophenia-style beach brawl between each Jenny’s followers (Nowhere’s gang all being various black-clad kinds of goths, punks, and techno-nihilists, in contrast to Everywhere’s more brightly colored subcultures). But it’s been long enough now that I can confess that at various points I was working on two or three other ideas for follow-up stories.  One was entitled “Dance-Off 2004” (the year kept changing as it got delayed) and the concept speaks for itself. Then there was “You Say Derby! We Say Die!” which was not a reference to the town in the Midlands but rather to my interest in roller derby which peaked circa 2007-2009 or so (and was named after the band You Say Party). But the last time I was kicking an idea around, it was 2012 and I was already thinking about something with a very different tone that was based around the idea of the Jenny Everywhere “gang” reuniting after going their separate ways. Lex now runs a pub and is married (to Lois from the coffee shop) with two kids. Bradley made a fortune designing extremely blasphemous videogames. Clea is an academic in San Francisco. Everyone quit smoking. Those three aforementioned sequels that never got made would appear as flashback panels, a montage of sorts, unfinished comics repurposed as “lost/secret adventures.” The tone for this was once again stolen from a Grant Morrison comic, namely the “zzzzenith.com” one-off sequel to Zenith. Less a sequel, more a bittersweet look back at an era.

If you've kept up with more recent Jenny projects to one degree or another, what are your thoughts on them? 

N: I haven’t, but they’re on the ‘to do’ list.

If you had limitless time and budget for it, what would be your “dream” Jenny project?

N: Limitless time and budget…? Oooooh. Multiverse versions of the Right-On gang. Sci-fi stuff, cosmic stuff. Stuff that’s wild to draw. The same snappy feel and flow of the originals, but with extra helpings of the rainy melancholy Joe brought in at the close of Damn Fine Hostile Takeover. 

Do you think you'll ever return to the character? How differently would you approach it if you did?

N: Time permitting, absolutely. It was fun. 

J: Well, the gap in time since I last toyed with the idea of a nostalgic sequel comic is now longer than the original time period between the first comics and that one. And those years mean that I both feel more distance from my version of the character, and the supporting cast I gave her, but also more unqualified affection. I joked about embarrassment earlier but it’s actually been long enough now that I’ve passed through and out of the period where I found anything about it embarrassing. What I was writing reflects who I was at the time and also maybe a little of where the zeitgeist was: the violence is cartoony, there’s no consequences to it, and there’s what I would call a Bush-era assumption that going out and partying is in itself halfway to being some kind of act of resistance. For me those comics are a memento from a very specific time in my life, and if I wrote something about that particular Jenny Everywhere now, it would definitely be an older, wiser version. As a sober 45 year-old living in Chicago, Illinois, looking back at something I wrote when I was a heavy-drinking Londoner in his early 20s, it’s even more bittersweet and melancholy.  Jenny and the gang were supposed to be reminiscent of various friends of my own. Over the course of 20 years, you inevitably lose touch with people. You move far away physically (I relocated to a different continent!), you drift apart. And sometimes you fall out with people, and sometimes people die, both of which have happened to me. I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Nila Gupta (rest in power) here, who was a big inspiration for my version of Jenny and for my general idea of a gang of cool anti-corporate people running amok in Right-On.  Losing people who used to be part of your life is individually tragic but it’s also the kind of experience you’re a lot more likely to have by the time you’re 45 than when you’re 23. If this answer sounds like it’s turning into a bummer, it shouldn’t entirely, because the flipside to that is you do develop some perspective, some better priorities, some sense of what you’re supposed to be doing with your life.

N: Oh Nila… ❤️ I had no idea your Jenny was inspired by them. That's beautiful. 

And that's all, folks! They'll be reading this over, so I want to thank Joe and Neil/Nelson again, both for helping to create a character who still means so much to so many of us, niche though she may be… and for taking the time to bring us these insightful, entertaining, and often moving glimpses into the mental world from which Jenny — at least their Jenny — first sprung.

Happy Jenniversary, and thanks for everything!

[pardonmydelays]

oooh the last two anon replies got me fired up so here's my manifesto i guess.

the universal hating on lin manuel miranda comes down to a few factors that most of the time have nothing to do with his actual mistakes:

their cringe history is reflected in him and they can't deal with it. let it be known that it is not lin who created miku binder jefferson. that was entirely a monster of our making. and somehow, his enthusiasm and willingness to interact with fan content (i remember everyone loving him for it) is worthy of punishment in relation.

he's an easy scapegoat to dump criticism on because people already feel so comfortable speaking on him. like you said, it's crazy that people will paint out lin manuel miranda, the guy who changed broadway and did so much for POC roles, to be the big baddie. he's made mistakes, and there's a lot we can discuss about hamilton's legacy, etc., but damn. where's this energy for everyone else? is it a case of "he actually tried, therefore we have material to latch onto and tear down?"

a lot of what he does is successful and in the public eye! it's crazy but i see people going "why is lin manuel miranda in everything" about projects from the 2000s, like yeahh he didn't just make hamilton and then disappear for your own convenience. if anything it's a statement about how a lot of his work, like it or not, is remembered over time. the reaction to him being in percy jackson was crazy to me because i KNOW for a fact that you did not see his dark materials or tick tick boom; at most you know him from moana and hamilton. and then complaining that he "threatened disney to be in everything they do" smh.

he's not your typical white boy of the month. this might be a loaded statement but sue me, i think it's true. POC celebrities have a limited amount of time in the sun compared to white celebrities. a white actor having multiple roles in a year is okay, and it means they're a hard worker. but when it's a POC actor, their presence is conspicuous. their presence becomes bothersome. public goodwill dries up so much faster. even pedro pascal, i feel, has been talked about with eye-rolls recently. i read a very interesting paper about this.

it's fun! the internet's chosen him as their punching bag, and there are no consequences to online hating if everyone else agrees. i bet a lot of people think they're just joking.

and all of this makes it such that if they do find out about some of his actual mistakes, it's a relief. i legitimately saw a tiktok comment section filled with bashing, and someone said "this is so hilarious but kinda mean, the guy didn't do anything" and someone said with "actually he did this this and this" and they replied "oh thank god, i don't feel bad now!" so it's not "oh let's see if this person improved" it's "phew! i have a legitimate reason to continue what i've been doing all along!"

it's crazy because i'm not even a lmm fan necessarily. i've just been in the musical community for years and noticed all of this happening surrounding his very popular work. you all will rue the day! 10 yrs later or so people are going to start making those "he deserved better" posts but i will not forgive or forget.

i don't know if you want me to respond to every single thing you wrote here, but i appreciate the message, especially when it comes from someone who's not really a fan - it only shows me that it's possible not to be in the fandom & still be respectful.

don't even get me started on miku binder jefferson, it's probably the most ridiculous thing i've ever seen in my life. also, one thing i need to point out is that NOT EVERYONE in this fandom is like that, & i think i'm a perfect example of a person who just enjoys lin's art & likes talking about it & analizing things, but not enjoying all those weird cringe things that were created by the fandom (like the one you mentioned), so like... maybe a certain part of the fandom was the problem, not the creator of the thing? i have nothing against fanfiction in general, nothing against fanarts but like... some people are ruining the thing cause it's just too much. like the famous lmm cannibal mermaid fanfiction, come on guys, be serious, what the actual fuck???

i also agree with the percy jackson thing, i remember seeing all the hate even before the episode with him dropped & honestly i couldn't stand it, the pjo fandom ruined all the fun for me & i literally had to block pjo tag lol. then the episode was out & everyone was suddenly like OH, HE WAS ACTUALLY GOOD, well guess what bitch, i've been saying this all the time, he is actually a good actor & you are just a miserable hater. this fandom is toxic as fuck. also, you think he's everywhere? i do know a lot of other celebrities who actually ARE everywhere these days & somehow no one is sick of them??? so maybe people really are just racists. also, this is literally his job lol what do you expect him to do, disappear forever?

i will not forgive or forget either. like i said before, i'm aware that he made some mistakes, it's not like he didn't apologize for some of them, also he's not perfect, but no one is. all i'm trying to say is that there are more problematic people but somehow everyone feels the need to hate on him. you picked the wrong guy, just let him be.

[brehaaorgana]

The thing is, websites being slowly destroyed because of capitalist greed is bad in general for many reasons, but I would like to point out that one of those reasons is that not every social website is built to handle the same kinds of engagement in the same ways, and this destroys spaces that can't simply be ported elsewhere because they are symbiotic to their origins.

You destroy specific kinds of communities and communication styles that rely on the uniqueness of individual platforms. You can't move that to somewhere else with a different structure without fundamentally changing something.

This has always been true, but I feel like not everyone is fully...aware or familiar with how this happens. It's not even entirely a Gen Z thing either - there are plenty of Millennials/Xers and older generations who did not have a ton of internet access in the early-mid 2000's and so don't necessarily have familiarity with what vanished. Internet access has only recently been "expected," for more people across the class spectrum.

As a Millennial(TM) who has been connected to the internet basically since infancy (my dad did IT/software engineer management stuff and would literally sit me on his lap while he was on the computer as a baby), I am keenly aware of a) the fact that there are entire internet social communities which I didn't engage with but are now gone and b) that there are ones I did engage in and are lost or no longer really the same because of capitalism.

Like...forums are just not as popular anymore as they used to be. They still exist, but it's harder to find them and they usually see way less activity than other platforms. And we lose so much knowledge/advice/engagement without them. Things like: I turned around one day and found a digital art forum I used to lurk on was totally gone, along with all the inspiration, tutorials, and tips. I remember one thread was this one guy wanting to learn to draw, and it was basically just his progress journal of learning to draw. It went over the course of YEARS of progress from like, stick figures to beautifully rendered art. Shit inspired me so much, and I think it just...vanished?

But then there's things like, entire social norms, jokes, and kinds of engagement that also vanishes or becomes a graveyard. Forums usually have karma systems (which reddit apes, sort of) and that could tell you a lot about an account lol.

Look at the slow death of livejournal! Dreamwidth sort of...tried to fill the gap but there's so many platform specific expectations and experiences that Livejournal had:

Icons that you change based on: interests, content or intent of your post/comment, that you can create and have others use and which change often.

Related: icons and graphics communities.

CAPSLOCK COMMUNITIES WHERE YOU DON'T LAPSLOCK EVER!! EVERYONE TALKS LIKE THIS

Locked communities (especially age based!) Or dedicated communities with moderation and agreed upon rules unique to that comm. Tumblr literally can't recreate that. It doesn't port to how Tumblr specifically works.

Comms like ONTD, stupid_free, or comedy shit like weepingcock, - or even like, scanlations comms. Shit that just doesn't translate to tumblr's style, especially without optional anonymous engagement and nested conversations. There's no such thing as FFAF on Tumblr. It doesn't work. You don't break the internet here the same way ONTD did when Michael Jackson died.

Dedicated fandom/ship comms. As someone who was quite literally harassed on Tumblr for years because I didn't like a specific non-canon ship between a literal teenaged child and an adult and talked about it without tagging it (and even censored it when just words suddenly showed in tags!) I miss dedicated fandom comms so much. Because I had way more control over who engaged with me on my personal LJ and NEVER would've bothered people on a comm about a ship I hated because it's shitty behavior and because people who do that got banned! Shared communities with moderation and better blocking settings were benefits I didn't have on Tumblr.

Just...it doesn't translate to Tumblr and now it's just a tiny space on DW and the zombie of LJ.

Similarly I don't think AITA translates very well to Tumblr because Tumblr doesn't:

Have nested comments/comment threads that can be collected all on one central page

Have easy to make throwaway accounts

Allow for anon responses to posts directly (it's only asks! They can't reblog anonymously!)

Have an upvote system

Have a "sort by most popular" or "sort by oldest."

Have autoretention/bot capture of the original submission.

A way to click through to someone's comments in other communities, or see what their responses to the thread as the op easily.

A collection of moderators and standardized community rules and community ability to report trolling/spam/fiction/shit posts.

Call me a killjoy but AITA won't fully translate to Tumblr for the same reason why ONTD isn't translated to Tumblr, and even a similar concept to ONTD looks totally different on reddit (see: deuxmoi). It will look different, it won't have the same community or feel simply because the platform itself is different enough that it inherently changes how we engage, what that engagement looks like, and what can even feasibly be done.

When a website dies, the unique communities and communication styles of that platform also start to die.

[passerkirbius]

Hi! This is perhaps, slightly off-top for the topic-as-of-late, but something I've wondered about audio fiction production: When I started listening to podcasts, I always assumed that apps like Spotify, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, etc, paid a small amount per stream to the artist, as they do with music. Found out this year that's not the case, which is of course, why many podcasts must rely on ads or crowdfunds/Patreon. Is there a reason for this? Is it preferred, hated, neither/both/something else?

So, the simple reason is because of the origins of podcasting in the first place.

This is going to be a bit long, because the history of this is relatively obscure, so I have to go through a bit of history.

So, Podcasting in the form that it exists in now, is old as balls in internet terms, being conceived in 2000 and implemented in 2001. The technology that underlies Podcasting is a system called RSS, which was originally created as a way of syndicating website content - the idea was that a website could have it's content available as an RSS feed, that other websites could read and then distribute that content on their own sites.

Thing is RSS, is dumb as fuck. RSS is literally just a specifically formatted file, that gets popped on a web server, that computer programs can easily read and extract the information and it's context. But in the heady days of the 2000s, this was a revelation! It required very little work from a web server, didn't require authentication, and because you weren't pulling all the formatting work from a website, it was generally a lot lighter on a website's bandwidth. It was an entirely open system that anyone could use, which of course meant that just about every website used it for a while, for just about everything it could. In fact, every Tumblr still has an RSS feed - If you add a /rss to the end of your tumblr URL, it'll give you the RSS feed! So, you can take a look at just how dead simple the whole system is.

Podcasting added just a tiny little twist to the RSS system - it allows the RSS feed to include a link to an audio file, formatted so that a feed reader could identify the file and provide the metadata (and not just audio - you could use it for video and images too, but those didn't take off as much as audio did). It took a few years for programs to appear that could actually read and distribute these feeds, and the whole thing really took off when Apple's iTunes (who were looking for free, easy-to-provide content for iPod customers) not only added podcast RSS support, but created their Podcast directory, making it much easier for listeners to find podcasts they might want to listen to. In fact, it's because of this embrace of podcasting that audio-on-demand (as it was called then) got associated with iPods (which were utterly in the Zeitgeist at the time), and audio-on-demand became known as podcasting. Yep, that's right - podcasting was named after the iPod. Now you know!

In the 20+ years since podcasting took off, the system hasn't changed, like at all - podcasts still use RSS, in fact, the RSS they use is extremely similar to the RSS used 20 years ago, there's been pretty much no advancement in the technology used here. There's a few of reasons why this has happened.

The first reason is that Apple Podcasts has, for most of the period of Podcasting, been the biggest distributor of podcasts. They have the directory, they have a massive share of the Apple ecosystem market, and most importantly, they've mostly just left the whole scene alone, happy to reap the benefits without doing any of the work. It also means that there's a huge number of podcast applications, and like Apple, other audio apps have been happy to treat podcasts as neat free add-on content. This has (generally) meant that podcasters have been free to do whatever, but it has a nasty side effect - because Apple Podcasts has such market power, no change in the podcast infrastructure could happen without them agreeing to it. Because you can, absolutely, make extensions to RSS (and there's been tons of work in doing that) but if Apple doesn't implement it, then a good 50% of the market isn't going to see the benefits, and none of the other podcasting apps will bother to implement it, which means that Podcast hosts (the companies that actually host the RSS feeds and content these days) will bother to set up their feeds to support it. Apple didn't exactly control Podcast RSS but they did exert enormous influence over what changes got implemented.

The second reason is that when advertisers eventually realised that podcasts were worth spending money on to sell their wares, Podcasters and advertisers suddenly realised that there wasn't really an agreed-upon way to confirm how well a podcast was going, what their audience was, etc. Eventually, a de facto standard was agreed upon, and "downloads" was the primary way to gauge the success of a podcast. Eventually, this was formalised, and the International Advertising Board created a technical specification saying what should be counted as a download, what shouldn't etc.

So, what this means is that now, podcasters had a vested interest in ensuring that their download figures were correct - anyone in the podcast ecosystem messing with those figures were going to hear about it from irate podcasters (the worst type!). This, ultimately, has pretty much entirely prevented podcasting from migrating away from the very open RSS system to anything else - the standard is there, advertisers and podcasters rely on it, you can't really fuck with it.

The third reason is sorta a side effect of the other two, but it's worth calling out on it's own - Podcasting is a huge ecosystem. Unlike services like Spotify or YouTube, which are closed systems where everything is run from the same system, RSS is truly decentralised. Anyone can make a podcast host, anyone can make a podcast reader, because no one has to ask permission from anyone else. Because RSS has no owner, and the whole system is designed from the ground up on that assumption, no podcast host or listening platform has ever managed to get so big that it could extinguish everyone else in the system. And this is now almost a part of podcasting culture - anyone trying to build a system that fucks with this ends up having to fight every other player in the podcast ecosystem, as well as every podcaster.

These three reasons have meant that the decentralised RSS system has remained King, Downloading has remained the primary way to distribute podcasts rather than streaming*, and no single app or service has ever had a monopoly over the podcast game. This means that, for better or worse, podcasts have always been free to distribute, free to listen to, and it's not really possible to make a single platform pay for each listen - you couldn't ban them from your RSS feed in reality, not for long.

All this together means that there's been no automated monetisation for podcasts, and so monetisation has been frustratingly manual - you have to either sell ads yourself, sign up with a advertising company who will help you do it, or go the Patreon route and hope to god you get popular enough for the Patreon to support you before you burn out.

And just on that subject, it's actually worth noting that ads, generally, are a pretty bad solution for fiction podcasts - podcast ads are generally sold per episode slot, and you might have at most two slots per episode. Fiction Podcasts don't tend to have many epsiodes compared to other podcasts, because the amount of effort is generally much higher - you need to write scripts, cast actors, record them, do the dialogue edit, do your sound design, etc, and most fiction podcasters simply cannot do this on a week-to-week basis - or at least, they can't do it for long before burnout hits. That usually means that fiction podcasters run on a seasonal basis, producing the whole season in one go and releasing on a schedule - which means they can't release episodes consistently for the whole year. That means less episodes for ads, which means less money for ads. Worse, the best rates for ads are for what's called "midroll" ads - ads that are in the middle of the podcast episode. If you haven't built your show explicitly for this, it means that you have to break up the action and take your listener out of the fiction to listen to an ad - not an ideal experience for anyone.

That's the main reason why fiction podcasters jumped onto crowdfunding. Campaign crowdfunding, like Kickstarter, means that you can convert your popularity to next season's budget, and the Kickstarter can also be a great advertising tool, helping you fund merchandising, and encouraging backers to spread the news of your podcast far and wide. Subscription crowdfunding, like Patreon, gives you a different kind of revenue stream, in theory allowing your most committed audience to support your creation process year-round, and not needing to go through the stress and hassle of a campaign crowdfund.

To be clear, Patreon isn't always so great either - The most successful Patreons provide their patrons with more of the same type of content that you're known for. This generally means making more audio fiction content just for your patrons, which means you have a delicate balancing act of creating more content that links to your show's main content while making the actual show, without doing anything that bleeds into the main content so much that non-patrons who haven't seen the other content feel like they can't get a satisfactory experience just listening to the main feed (and it's true that this can encourage people to become Patrons, but more often it will just turn people away from your show). Also, it can be really hard if you end up with just enough Patrons to feel indebted to them, but not actually having enough Patrons for the money to actually support you in creating the art. That can feel like all the downsides and none of the upsides.

Hopefully this big explainer goes a little bit of the way to explaining the monetization environment for podcasters!

*This has changed somewhat with Spotify - Spotify actually does still download apps once and streams everything from it's own servers, but it managed a neat trick here - it allowed podcast hosts access to listening statistics, so that podcasters could still collate Spotify information and use it the way they do download data - very smart of them, honestly!

[ivyial]

hii, how are you? I stumbled upon your page and I started to check it out, upon doing that I came across one of your eagleone posts, and how you view the ship or how you view people who dislike the shop entirely for no reason at all. and to be honest I couldn't agree more. your choice of words and how you describe just makes my heart feel hope again. hope that there's actual human beings that are using a gift called a brain for once.

it honestly drives me crazy to see people literally sending death threats and literal racism to those who ship a ship that isn't quite popular. another account just a few days ago that speaks alot about eagleone and analyses their scenes and dialogues, got literal death threats that would me a grown adult puke from how disgusting to know such human beings exist.

( didn't realize to be that long LMAO )

anyway I just wanted to say that I absolutely love all your eagleone content literally makes my day <3

i- 🥺🥺❤❤ omg thank you so much anon

i've never been one for ship wars. what bothers me the most about the eagleone discourse (and the current cleon discourse on twitter as well) is how likening characters to siblings (eagleone) or saying one views the other as a kid (cleon - insane take but anyway) eventually becomes "these characters are LITERALLY siblings, they are so sibling coded to me that it essentially makes them actual siblings" and creates a breeding ground for harassment and accusations of proshipping.

shipping has always been a matter of personal taste, and it's one of those few things in fandoms where there's no need to debate about conflicting ships. in the end, you can just agree to disagree. i like X for those reasons and you like Y for those. that's it. ships are usually better enjoyed with fellow shippers. it only risks becoming an echochamber when people start to take it so seriously that their group of shippers decides to hate on everyone else, and eventually, to harass them.

which is unfortunately what is happening right now. i'm very aware of the death threats and everything else, and it's sad and infuriating to realise that fandoms will never change. idk how old you are anon, or if you were around on tumblr when it happened, but a few years ago, the voltron fandom was a big thing around here (i apologise in advance to everyone who had to live through that lmfao). klance was arguably the biggest ship in the fandom (keith x lance), so the shippers were actively campaigning for it to become canon. it got to the point where klance shippers sent the show creators cupcakes filled with glass shards to convince them to canonise the ship. I WISH I WAS FUCKING KIDDING

this stuff's not new, bullying fellow fans isn't new unfortunately, and bullying actors or producers isn't either. if i remember correctly, when supernatural s4-5 (i guess) were airing back in the 2000s, dean's love interest jo was removed from the show supposedly because fangirls lost their shit and sent hate mail to producers. but that's all speculation, i can't find a reliable source for that.

i wish people would stop taking everything so seriously and get this nasty over fiction. however, it's unlikely that it will happen, because fandoms are filled with kids who don't know any better, are sometimes fully raised by the internet and then turn into immature adults. it's rare to find spaces in fandoms were you can genuinely have fun and create content without being policed by 12 year olds, but when you can, it makes the fandom experience a lot better.

i don't put much content out there, but i'm glad to see that the few posts i write are appreciated!! i'm working on an eagleone fic rn so it definitely makes me want to keep working on it regularly and create more content 😭