#cause its silly that they had the time to put racism in but not enough time to actually confront it

[aero-sense]

ok this was just meant to be a silly post, but might as well get into it. It's not that I can't understand why Zuko being racist is realistic, I know it is, but what value does it have to the story genuinely?

I was talking to another fan, apart of another fandom, about racism portrayed in fiction. Writers love the "realism" of racism esp from their "redeemed" characters spouting racist remarks to their new found family. But what about the "realistic" reaction of those on the receiving end? Y'know the victims? Do they not get hurt? Do they never punch back? We go from a group of heroes fighting against injustice, to them twiddling their thumbs as their new "friend" calls them slurs as a nickname (and yes, I've seen it in atla fandom).

And that's how I feel about Zuko's racism in the show. It's actually frustrating cause every time fans bring up that aspect of Zuko's character, it always get redirected to "it's good for his arc! Its benefits for his character!" What do I care! I'm not bringing up his racism to center him. Where's the focus on how it's good for the other characters to suffer like this? Does it benefit their arcs?

The scenes I was thinking of when I wrote this post was when Zuko diminished the role the monks had in Aang's life (right after finding out they all died) compared to his biological father (lol), and when he mocked Aang's culture again in TSR. And you know what I think? That's there's barely a difference between these scenes.

The things he says is never addressed outright. His attitude is never confronted as a genuine issue. And it's wild because the gaang reacted far more to less injustice in the past. These kids would be angrier at being teased by their friends and weren't afraid to put their foot down at outright discrimination, only to be made "diplomatic" towards their so called "reformed" member. While we're taught Zuko is changing and to keep less expectations, are we also taught you can't call out your friend or be angry whenever they insult your culture?

You said so yourself, the show didn't have any time to dive into it (say compared to issues he had with his family) or get him to actually CHANGE. And if Zuko is becoming a better person (a bit late if he's pulling this crap all the way to the finale) then why not have him face consequences of his words? Why not have him outcasted by the group momentarily and have his views be challenged, why not show him struggle with criticism and then learn to accept it? Y'know, if he really wants to change?

so yeah @survivalove I agree, there's a racism problem in the fandom. I was actually thinking a while ago, about some fans that believe Zuko's in the right for what he said, for whatever justifications the plot has. So why have they not questioned the fact that the writers choose to write a victim of genocide be ignorant and wrong for holding onto his culture, and that he should get reprimanded for it by the prince of the nation who committed said genocide? But instead we get fan headcanons of Zuko teaching Aang how to "correctly" be a monk, by knowledge he stole from the air temples when he was still in pursuit of the avatar, intending to finish the genocide for once and for all.

The problem with Zuko's portrayed bigotry in the later season is how people focus on his feelings first and that the audience and the characters should be considerate towards him, instead of the characters on the receiving end of his comments and how they are allowed to react. How we naturally expect grace and forgiveness from them so it can be a teachable moment for Zuko, or else, if they had reacted in angry or annoyance, they simple wouldn't have been good victims. How so many of the "brilliant moments" to show Zuko still needs to unlearn his mindset has him insult the gaang while they remain deaf and don't react at all to what he's saying or doing.

But I think it would be better in the future if fans stop using a character's racism to center them in discussions, and instead think how it's good or rather necessary for the characters involved. Enough of hearing fans saying they see themselves in "redeemed" characters, and more questioning if it was worth having fans of color to go through the show with discomfort without any resolution or condemnation from the narrative.

(Just to be clear @bluewithpurplepolkadots I'm not annoyed by your response (it's better than most), I'm actually glad cause it gave me an opportunity to talk about this.)

.....okay but funny how katara, sokka, toph, and etc, all manage to argue or disagree with aang's viewpoints without taking shots at his culture unlike zuko whenever he opens his mouth

[dragonsfell]

jaheira banter from bg2, part 1.

DO NOT REBLOG. Here's some conversations from Jaheira in Baldur's Gate 2; that I wanted to highlight. I owe the enhanced editions of the originals and play to plan again, but I wanted to share some some the interactions Jaheira had; to see where she came from // i wanted these saved on the blog // a warning that given the age of these games and the edition of D&D they spawn from; fantasy racism was at its height and everywhere and alignments were ever present & very black and white

With Aeerie ; a wingless avariel (winged elf) and lawful good cleric

Aerie: This... this light makes your hair look really pretty, Jaheira. Jaheira: Don't be a fool, it does nothing of the sort. Aerie: But— Jaheira: Put your silly romantic notions aside, Aerie. This isn't some childish fantasy, nor some grand adventure. Any one of us could die out here at any moment. Aerie: But we can go to the priests and—and they raise us from the dead again, as good as new, can't we? Jaheira: Sometimes they don't come back! Sometimes some people, no matter how much you love them and no matter what you try to do, get... they get taken away. You're young, Aerie... You'll figure it out soon enough.

the rest will be under th cut, because there a lot I wanna share. DO NOT REBLOG.

With Anomen ; a lawful neutral human fighter/cleric

Anomen: Lady Jaheira, it seems quite strange to me that a woman of clearly noble past would choose the life of an adventurer. What has brought you to this dangerous path? Jaheira: It is a path of conscience. Some druids choose a contemplative lifestyle, but I sought a more active role in the furthering of nature's cause. And you? Did you become a priest of Helm only for honor and glory? Anomen: Of course not. The righteous path ever beckons. It is merely a dividend of the Order that a member can make a place for himself in this difficult world. Jaheira: I see. What place you choose to make for yourself remains to be seen. Anomen: It does, but I assure you that you will not be disappointed. - - - - - Jaheira: You wear the scars of battle with pride, Anomen, like one who truly believes his cause. Anomen: I must. It is what pushes me forward. Doubt is the enemy. Jaheira: Those that never question do not see the whole of the issue. Anomen: The whole issue is not important. There is only the here and now, and what can be done within. Jaheira: Your world is small, if focused. The more impressive picture is always larger than you can see.

With Dorn ; a neutral-evil half-orc

Dorn: You have fire. I respect that. But I warn you, druid: Attempt to poison me again and you will not see the next sunrise. Jaheira: What nonsense are you babbling? Dorn: This concoction. You neglected to account for my orc blood. Next time, try something more potent. Jaheira: Do not be ridiculous. I am a druid, not an assassin. Dorn: Then how do you explain this vile brew? Jaheira: It is a mixture of myrtle and willow— Dorn: IT IS POISON. Jaheira: Drink it, Il-Khan. Or next time I will leave your wounds untended.

With Haer'Dalis ; a chaotic neutral tiefling blade

Haer'Dalis: Why do you stare at me so, Jaheira? Have I offended you? My manner is oft grim, but I did not think you so sensitive to it. Jaheira: No, no, I find your wit a treat, especially when it is unleashed upon the hapless that did not see it laying in wait. Haer'Dalis: Then why the glances as my head turns away? Jaheira: Forgive me the curiosity, but you are quite alien to me. You are not of this place and do not fit into the natural order, at least not by design. Haer'Dalis: Ahh, then you are wary and are intent on keeping me under guard?Jaheira: Not so much, but I am interested to see where your niche finds itself. I am wondering what you will balance, for all things have their counterpart. Haer'Dalis: I see. Perhaps I straddle the fence, providing my own balance. Perhaps I drop things on either side as whim dost take me. Jaheira: Or perhaps you enjoy the discord of chaos because you have not found that niche yet. We shall see. - - - - - Haer'Dalis: Ah, my hound, this city be the great world of commerce! Perhaps we can sell Jaheira? Jaheira: *groan* Cut your wit, bard. The day has been long already without adding hours to it. Haer'Dalis: Cut my wit? Why, certainly, if I could only use your nose's razor edge to perform the task. Jaheira: Aye, it seems I've sharpened it upon the grindstone of your heart. Haer'Dalis: Well, my frumpy ptarmigan, I must protest— Jaheira: "Methinks thou dost protest too much." Aye, I can quote the poets too. If you must protest, I respond only to hunger strikes and, even then, too late. Haer'Dalis: Oh, <CHARNAME>, raven of sympathy! Yon woman is stifling my creativity and stealing thunder from my wit! I swear I cannot work amidst the lashings of her tongue!

With Hexxat ; a neutral evil vampire thief

Jaheira: You should know that I neither trust nor like you, Hexxat. Hexxat: I'd have been happier simply suspecting as much. Jaheira: <CHARNAME> seems to like you well enough, and I have great respect for HIM/HER Hexxat: As do I. Jaheira: I know you did not seek to become what you are. I will try to look past it as best I can. Hexxat: Thank you, Jaheira. I shall try to prove myself worthy of your respect. - - - - - Jaheira: I must admit you have surprised me, vampire. Hexxat: Oh? Jaheira: I expected you to betray us at the earliest opportunity. Yet you still remain by <CHARNAME>'s side. Hexxat: I would feel the same in your position. Jaheira: I would still slay you, given the opportunity. Hexxat: I'll be sure to bear that in mind. Jaheira: But for now... I am willing to accept your place in the party. Hexxat: That means a lot to me, Jaheira. Sincerely. Thank you.

With Keldorn ; a lawful good human inquisitor

Jaheira: Keldorn? You look pensive. Are you well? Keldorn: I am well enough, Jaheira, though our circumstance gives me reason to pause. Jaheira: Hmm. I have been thinking as well. It is hard to draw a line in the sand and say, "This side represents balance; this other side does not." Keldorn: Balance? Would that balance were the worst of our worries. Jaheira: Ah. Having trouble with the black and white aspects? Keldorn: That would be an understatement. I am quite certain of what evil lies ahead, but I am finding problems with identifying the "good" path around it. Jaheira: I'm not sure what to say. We do what we can when the opportunity presents itself. Keldorn: That would be all that can be asked. Torm guide us; we need his wisdom.

With Mazzy ; a lawful goodd halfing fighter

Jaheira: Oh, omnipresent authority figure, what are your commands now?Mazzy: Jaheira, there is a level of sarcasm in your tone that is perhaps unnecessary. We have a leader that honestly tries to anticipate our needs... 1. Player: Heed Mazzy well, Jaheira. Mazzy: As I was saying, <HE/SHE> has enough trouble keeping this ragtag group together. Perhaps it would be better to be more constructive, and less... Jaheira: Bitchy? Mazzy: If that is how you wish to put it, yes. Jaheira: Worry not for the feelings of <CHARNAME>, small one, as <HE/SHE> and I go far back and have an understanding of sorts. Mazzy: As you will. It was only a humble suggestion. I've no wish to intrude upon your relationship with <CHARNAME>.

[fizzbot]

I literally just sent you one but what if. You did more. For me? :3333

9, 10, 11, 12, 18, 20, 21, 22, 24 VIOLENCE (please do not look at how I spelled it in the last one) ask game <333

3, 4, 13, 17 (This time with Octavia), 18 (Striker), 22 (Husk), 24 (This time with Fizz), 25 (This time with Charlie) for the other fandom ask game :333

JKLDHFJKLSDFHJKL NO ITS OK I LOVE GIVING YOU MY THINKIES!!!!!!!!!! :DDDDD lets do this!!!!!!!! >:333333

violence ask game og post here!

9. worst part of canon for hh, its the valangel plotline. god its so bad. you cant have a silly joke character also be a horrific abuser, you have to pick one. also dont hire rape fetish artists to handle a very real?? issue?? hello??? for hb,,,,,i gotta pick the same vein and give it to stolitz. I KNOW I KNOW i bitched a lot about them in the last answer post but JKLSDFJKLHJKf IT MAKES ME SO MAD. especially bc (much like hazbin) the original plot of the story is SO FUCKING GOOD. a group of low-ranking hell creatures run an illegal business where the access the human realm??? ARE YOU KIDDING ME. THATS SO GOOD. i love that its a direct parallel to hazbin's "solving the overpopulation" main plot JKLSHDFJKLDS ITS SO FUNNY AND SO PERFECT AND WE WERE ROBBED IN BOTH SHOWS FOR VIVZIES STUPID FUCKING FETISH BAIT

10. worst part of fanon the vivzie dickriders are so goddamn annoying. ive noticed that this is kind of a trend in any media that has a large "critic" audience. like it also totally happened with miraculous ladybug. but for some reason when a bunch of people hate on the show bc it sucks, mostly bc the creator also sucks, it spawns a parallel group of people who will defend anything and everything about it. like there are people who devote entire blogs and accounts to ""disproving"" vivzie allegations (which no one has ever done successsfully btw bc she did all of the shit shes being accused of). and theres people who will defend every shitty plotpoint and piece of bad writing and leave no room for nuance. like, yes, im critical of the shows, but i can admit theres good in them. obviously i enjoy them enough to have a sideblog for them. but like. these people dont understand that its GOOD to critisize media, ESPECIALLY media that you like. its important to acknowledge when certain trends can be seen in the work, because otherwise youre going to be more susceptible to being negatively influenced. like, vivzie has history of antiblackness/racism/antisemitism. is it a coincidence that these people are horribly misrepresented in the show?

11. number of fandom-related words you've filtered only 2 related to the hellaverse actually!! but ive had to put a whole bunch of different variants/spellings. i have radioapple and adamsapple blocked just cause theyre the most prevalent ships that i dont like.

12. the unpopular character that you actually like and why more people should like them MIMZY. i fucking love her SO MUCH!!!!!! :DDDDDDDD part of why i despise radioapple and its shippers so much is bc so much of the fandom hates her for ""interrupting their moment"". SHUT THE FUCK UP shes the best part of their song and also the best girl and shes so pretty and cute and youre all WRONG for hating her!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! light of my life <333333333 spinoff show about just mimzy immediately

18. it's absolutely criminal that the fandom has been sleeping on... rosie x mimzy :(((((((( they dont even have a proper, fully agreed upon shipname. i thought you all loved old women yuri :/// also POLYVEES????? i am SOOOOO sick of the ""vel and her gay dads"" shit. it is so goddamn annoying. VOX CALLS HER "MY DEAR". VAL CALLS HER "BABYDOLL." theyre all fucking.

20. part of canon you found tedious or boring honestly? all of hazbin. the heaven arc was just SO rushed and still felt like the same thing was happening every episode. helluva never/hasnt become tedious to me just bc its so much more episodic i think

21. part of canon you think is overhyped the fuckin. shipping. stolitz in helluva is SOOOOOO hyped and for NOTHING and the whole war was hyped in hazbin and yet was also so incredibly nothing. OH AND PENTIOUS' REDEMPTION??? everyones acting like its the most interesting plot twist ever as if it doesnt suck objectively

22. your favorite part of canon that everyone else ignores loona and via ://// the only time i see them talked about is when people are shipping them which is gross. i really really really want to see more of them and have them be developed more and given personalities outside their shitty fathers.

24. topic that brings up the most rancid discourse VALANGEL. OH MY GODDDDDDDDD i fucking HATE hearing ""hot takes"" about that arc. THEYRE NEVER HOT TAKES. EVER. theyre just excusing vals actions or excusing VIVS actions in making it. I HATE IT SO MUCH

fandom ask game og post here!

3. NoTP? OOH. i have a bunch. ummm. literally any striker ship that isnt blitzker. striker x chaz, striker x moxxie, striker x millie, striker x sallie, striker x stella, etc etc i could literally list them all day. i hate all of them. every single one cannot work without mischaracterizing him to hell. he works with blitz because theyre equals and they LIKE EACH OTHER. OH DUH radioapple!!!! literally biggest NOTP ever i fucking hate them. i hate adamsapple, and cherrisnake, anddddd.......there are obviously more but im blanking. some i dislike for more innocent reasons. like any ship with tex and/or any ship with sallie? i hate all of them just because those characters are so. Nothing. they have 0 substance apart from being sexualized

4. Is there a popular pairing you don't necessarily dislike but aren't too invested in? OH well i guess i kinda answered this above hsdjkf. i guess my hottest take is fallenstar (chaggie) and m&m. i simply do not give a shit about them. i care a LITTLE more for vega n charlie, but like. pretty much JUST because theyre sapphic. what does m&m have going for them, they are literally textbook boring married couple. who give a shit

13. What's a character or ship you haven't written/drawn yet but would like to some day? sjkdfhjksdf ive doodled them beforrreeeee but ive gotta draw more verbie <////3 im thinkin about making a finished piece for them they are CUTE.......otherwise i think ive drawn/written about like everyone i care for sjkdfhjsdkf

17. What's a book, movie, or show you think [Octavia] would like? AWW this is cute....ummmm!!!!! a piece of lore i just made up for her is that i think shes rlly interested in human culture. like she likes movies from earth, and literature from up there, so on and so forth <3333 shes really into horror movies but specifically the old and bad ones <3333 she will rattle off 100000 facts to you about how they made that fake blood for that scene or "did you know they used a REAL chainsaw?". i think she has an affinity for the macabre BUT i also think she has a bit of a soft spot. she was kind of robbed of a proper childhood a little bit (as were most goetians) so shes a sucker for sappy soft stuff too. she casually watches mlp or care bears and plays lots of minecraft and terraria <3

18. Type [Striker's]'s name and tell us what the autocomplete suggests as the next word shjkdfhjksdfhjkfsd ok so i wasnt sure whether this meant using google autocomplete or phone autocomplete. i tried google first and my only result was 'striker helluva boss' cause thats what i google for art ref. but then i tried it on my phone and. uh........................................................................this is so embarassing. i pulled out my phone and pressed the middle autocomplete button a few times and it landed on 'striker tying up blitzos arms'...........LISTEN. IT WAS BECAUSE I WAS WRITING DOWN THIS ART IDEA AND IT REMEMBERED. WHY DID IT REMEMBER

22. Give us a headcanon for [Husk] UMMMM!!!!!!! it is so muc harder to come up with these for characters i dont relate to as much..........i am so sorry but i have literally thought for so long and cant come up with anything that you havent already said <////////////////////333

24. What's your favourite thing about [Fizz]? i remember really not thinking anything of it at the time but i LOVE the transition of how he is in public/at ozzies to how he is at home!!!! its really interesting to see him soften up and i think theres a lot to be said about the persona he puts on in public that i just KNOW the show isnt gonna explore. i dont think hes the. best anxiety rep, but i do think there are moments where its compelling. OH and i LOVE watching his energy bounce off blitz, its super fun :3

25. What's your least favourite thing [Charlie] said or did? grgghgg ohh girl,,,,,you had so much wasted potential ://// this is a lot more nitpicky than my answer for stolas but its easily that one moment in ep 4. where she WHINES and CRIES like a BABY over angel and vega carries her away. the infantilization is SOOOO irritating, esp bc literally in the NEXT EPISODES they try to portray her as a strong and confident good leader???? its so pathetic and SO frustrating especially when she could easily make it up to angel by KILLING HIS RAPIST.

WAHHHJSKDFHJKLD THANKS FOR ASKINGGGGG i love getting out all my thinkies :33333

[whump-town]

You Dance With Tears In Your Eyes

Summary: a college AU set up in the late 80s/early 90s with football star and quarterback Derek Morgan and his secret boyfriend Hotch-- it's not a happy story but I don't think I really have to warn you guys about that anymore

Also, a little based on a story my grandmother told me about my great uncle and his partner. Never met my great uncle but everyone says I'm a lot like him, I think they just mean gay but don't know how to say it

Warnings: homophobia, violence, racism *I mean it when I say homophobia*

Pairing: Derek Morgan/Aaron Hotchner

@yourlocalheartbreaker

The title is from Frank Ocean's song Self Control

Now and then you miss it, sounds make you cry Some nights you dance with tears in your eyes I came to visit, 'cause you see me like a UFO That's like never, 'cause I made you use your self-control And you made me lose my self-control, my self-control

---------------------

Living shouldn’t be reduced down to what it is, the bare bones of things that don’t even make Derek Morgan who he is. He lives by them anyways, stupid rules. Social norms, Aaron always clarifies because even when those silly rules drown them Aaron needs to be concise. Social norms dictate every inch of life and for once Derek wishes he were the type of person who could be given that inch and take a mile. They’re the reason he can’t hold his boyfriend’s hand in public. Why he can’t kiss Aaron on New Years’ and why he is reduced down to loving his roommate. Why, at this rate, he’ll never marry or adopt children, or why he could lose any career he goes into because some nosy asshole finds out his partner isn’t a woman. And, yes, he knows there are anti-discriminatory laws but he’s a black gay man. The world is stacked against him.

It makes him so angry. He’s blinded by the irrational of it all, why nothing can just be simple for them. Aaron tries to comfort him but Derek’s anger scares him, he doesn’t understand it. Aaron has long lost the ability to decipher the complexity of human emotions. Still flinches at loud noises like he’s expecting each bump to be accompanied by the pain that laced his childhood and has to ask, around every turn, if Derek’s angry with him. He can’t tell. Everything looks like anger. With Derek, it frequently is. They cope in very different ways, Aaron chooses nothing. Shutting down all his emotions until he cracks and that’s worse. It’s worse than Derek’s anger. That doesn’t mean Derek doesn’t hate the way he quakes with fury. If not because it feels childish to be blinded by emotions then because it scares Aaron.

There are a million other things, at twenty there always is. It’s his philosophy class with all this bullshit reading he doesn’t understand. He has to ask Aaron for help and Aaron has to ask him for help with things too but it makes Derek feel stupid. It’s philosophy, it can’t be that hard. That’s the same way Aaron feels about calculus. There’s maintaining rent and going grocery shopping and football (games, practice, gym, and training).

College had been a learning curve. Getting up at four in the morning to go to the gym for football had been the hardest thing in the world without his mother flicking his bedroom lights on and off or Desiréecoming in to smack him in the face with a pillow. There’s no one in the entire world in charge of getting him out of his bed other than him and, in his freshman year, while he had thought sleeping on that impossibly hard mattress would leave much to be desired, and it did, he found himself glued to his every morning. Not wanting to leave the safety of its flimsy comfort.

Sharing an apartment worked wonders, having a workaholic boyfriend was really the best trick. An unexpected answer to his problems but, also, a very cute one. He managed to add one person to the list of people that cared about where he was, that made sure he got up in time to make it to the gym and practice, and asked if he had a bad day or rub at his sore muscles.

Derek rolls over in bed, not as surprised as he should be to find the other half empty. “Aaron?” He still searches, runs his hand over the sheets as if he doesn’t know that if Aaron were in the bed he’d be right there. Hogging the bed and the blankets, pressed up against Derek’s back snoring like there’s no tomorrow. “Aaron?” Derek sits up and squints, grimaces at the light trailing in from the open door.

Aaron’s hunched over the beginnings of an essay, pen ink smeared across his left palm and steadily chugging along. He can write a full essay in the span of a night, five hours for about 3,000 words but if it’s a short synopsis sort of thing then about an hour. Despite this astonishing gift, Aaron still makes himself write all his essays weeks in advance and spends days upon days proofreading and combing through them for the tiniest mistakes. He’s a straight-A student so he’s doing something right but Derek gets mostly As too with far less hastily. Aaron is just extra.

Derek steps up to the desk, doesn’t make a sound as he leans up against the side of the chair. He wraps an around Aaron’s shoulders, leans down to kiss his head. “It’s two,” Derek informs him, “come to bed. Please?” Derek’s exhausted. He feels the regret of being pulled from his warm bed. Each second feels like twenty minutes, the world sluggish and too cold. He leans closer to Aaron, wrapping himself around him. “You always smell so good,” Derek whispers. He presses his face into Aaron’s hair, catching the mix of scents.

“Bakery,” Aaron grunts. His answer as simple and concise as he always is but even more so now that he’s tired. Aaron had worked an on-campus job for the entirety of their freshman year but after he got a scholarship that would roll over each year after that (so long as he kept a certain GPA) he started at a bakery down the street from their apartment. Derek had always liked the way Aaron smelled, gently masculine in a way only Aaron could ever be, and it had mixed with the scents of softly, perfectly made baked goods he works around all day. Cookies and cakes. He’s picked up a few tricks, Aaron can make moist cakes and perfectly round cookies but his bread… It’s the best food Derek has ever eaten.

The first time Aaron made bread Derek got down on one knee and confessed “Aaron Hotchner if I could marry you I’d take you to the damn chapel right now”. To which he was lovingly pushed and told to “shut up” but fresh-baked bread (even if Aaron had taken a single bite and concluded he hadn’t ratioed the sugar right) is heavenly. He’s gotten much better since and it’s really hot when he’s standing there in one of his dress shirts with the sleeves rolled up taking his stress out on the dough.

And he can’t tell anyone. Can’t boast about his hot ass boyfriend or the bread he makes from scratch.

Derek crouches down by the chair, knows he’s winning when Aaron breaks from his work just enough to glance at him out of the corner of his eye. “Can’t this wait just a little bit?” he asks. “I want to sleep with my boyfriend and he’s out here writing an essay that isn’t due tomorrow and likely isn’t due for the next month.” Derek reaches up, strokes a strand of hair back behind Aaron’s ear. His fingers graze an open wound and Aaron flinches away, the pain unexpected.

The bare bones of Aaron Hotchner are the along the same in principle to Dereks-- all things that he cannot change. Even as he stands as tall as Derek, their bodies are not the same. Derek is lean from years of football, his arms stretch his shirts. He looks like an athlete, has the benefit of the doubt whenever he’s around men. His teammates walk naked in front of him, no one for even a second thinks anything of it. No one suspects him of the atrocities he commits within his apartment.

Aaron doesn’t have any of that. His hair is a little too long, hangs down in his face when he’s studying or reading. Nothing about him is hulk-ish, he’s delicate with his movements and while it had been something that Derek was immediately drawn to it also draws other’s attention. Bad attention.

The same boys that play around with Derek, snapping towels at him while he walks, terrorize Aaron.

Derek wishes there was something he could do because if this were anyone else- if Aaron were a girl- he could. It wouldn’t be dangerous, not the sort of thing that would cost him his football scholarship or get him stabbed and left to bleed out in an alley or beat within an inch of his life. He would have to out himself to protect Aaron, to stand in front of his teammates that coach keeps calling his family and tell them to keep their fucking hands off his boyfriend. No. No, because something like that would be death. It would be worse than what’s already happening. And Aaron won’t allow it.

All Derek can do now is await the next attack, leave Aaron someplace to come home to. Give him a place to be, without burden, without hesitation. It’s not enough. They’ll kill him. Derek knows they will and it’ll be fun for them, only a matter of time.

“Come to bed with me,” Derek asks one more time. He doesn’t want to sound entirely needy but he really doesn’t want to go to bed without Aaron. The bed is lonely.

With a sigh, Aaron nods and Derek stands up, moves out of the way so Aaron can throw pens in his textbooks to mark his place. He steps away, from the desks, yawning as he makes lazy lurches forward towards their bedroom. “Turn the damn--” Derek rolls his eyes and reaches over and turns off Aaron’s desk lamp.

He passes Aaron in the doorway, places his hand on his hip, and reminds him of their objective. “Bed,” he mumbles and Aaron nods, jerking back to life as he steps further into the bedroom.

Derek lays down on the bed, crawls over to his side, and gets comfortable while he watches Aaron lazily strip down to his underwear. He gets caught in his head again for a moment, standing there just blankly staring at the dresser. Trying to figure out if he should put on pajamas or not. Derek calls his name and opens his arms. “Come here, “ he says and Aaron smiles. Sheepishly he comes, blushing as he crawls into the bed and where Derek instructs him. Humming, pleased, when Derek brings the blankets up over them. His eyes are already closed, head tucked under Derek’s chin when Derek wraps his arms around him. Pulls him close, tight.

He’d read in a book about deep pressure, its effect on the parasympathetic nervous system. He’d studied Development Psychology for some time, thought about all the ways in which it checked every box of his interests. He thinks he might want to be a teacher. That’s where he learned about the importance of the bond between guardian and child. Where he learned a hug sometimes really is a fantastic answer to the most startling problems.

It’s also the fastest way to get Aaron to sleep.

“Tighter,” Aaron whispers. He can’t quite feel Derek’s bones pushing into him, the hammer of his heart still too strong. He groans, choking up a laugh when Derek does just that. Holds him tight, makes him ache with the proximity, his inability to move.

Derek doesn’t mind, he’s got an armful of bakery boy. Couldn’t be more content with anything else.

0000000000000000

All things considered, Derek didn’t actually face that much scrutiny when he told his mother about the stupid twisting and turning feeling in his stomach when Martel Harris put his hand on Derek’s back. Leaned in too close and Derek could smell the cologne he wore and feel his proximity like lightning across his skin. He’d thought it was just nerves but at the end of a football match Martel lifted him up, threw him up in the air, and God that had felt better than flying. Lit him up inside like he was something, someone.

Desiréecried and Sarah wouldn’t speak to him for a week, opposite reactions because of the same fear. Their mother always said the two of them were two halves of the same coin-- too alike to get along and too different to ever get away. They came around, their mother’s gentle hand always the voice of reason. Three stubborn as all hell kids, too much like their father. That’s what she tells the three of them, tears swelling in her eyes as she proclaims that none of it matters. Orders Desiréeto stop crying tells Sarah to get over herself. She loved and married a black man despite the death threats that followed them everywhere they went. Despite the people that called it blasphemous. Called it sin. As if love could be such a thing.

Her mother told her not to come home, not to call. She wouldn’t do that to her son, she knows it won’t change a thing. There’s something about love that makes you blind to the small pains. She never looked back twice, never reached out to her parents. She chose love and Derek will too.

But that doesn’t mean the fear goes away.

It doesn’t actually change a damn thing.

Standing in the tiny bathroom attached to Derek’s friend’s bedroom Aaron leans over the sink, letting Derek rub

shampoo through his beer-drenched hair. “I just don’t understand why they have it out for you,” Derek mumbles, his voice has deepened, his frustration laced confusion evident. They’re in a rather suggestive position, Derek’s body keeping Aaron bent over the sink-- ass to groin. Aaron shoots him a look out of the corner, a pretty clear “look at us right now and take a guess at why”. Derek ignores the look, he’s rather good at ignoring Aaron’s sharp looks. He shakes his head, grumbling some more to himself and gently working the shampoo out of Aaron’s hair. He leans closer, Aaron groaning as the sink bites into his stomach, and smells his hair. Derek groans, unsatisfied with what he finds. “Smells like strawberries with a slight undertone of beer.”

Sounds about as close to a win as they’re getting. “That’s as good as it’s going to get,” Aaron mumbles, grateful when Derek sits back up. While Aaron’s come to terms with the particular hand he’s drawn in the terms of college social lives Derek isn’t as quick to accept. He feels hopeless, a feeling he thought he’d escaped upon leaving Chicago and everything Carl Buford. Aaron can’t stand to see that look, the one he’s grown so used to seeing after events like this.

He pulls a towel down off the rack, starts trying to dry his hair. This isn’t the reason he keeps his hair short but it’s certainly a helpful addition to keep in mind. “Don’t overthink it, it’s not your fault.” Aaron could go blue in the face trying to keep Derek from coming up with a mile-long list of all the reasons why that’s simply not true. The truth is, it’s really not Derek’s fault. No one even knows about them. Their relationship isn’t the reason why Hunter Whatever-his-last-name-is poured his cup of cheap, smells like piss, beer over Aaron’s head.

Not that what happened downstairs can just be so beautifully summed up as just that. Hunter Whatever-his-last-name-is had grabbed Aaron as he was walking in, doing as Derek instructed by coming in the screened-in door at the side of the house. “Who’s dick did you come to suck?” and Hunter Whatever-his-last-name-is cupped Aaron’s cheek. Dug his thumb into the wound he created and smiled, grinned happily at the sight of Aaron trying so hard to getaway. Hunter’s grip relaxed and as soon as it did Aaron was blinking the beer out of his eyes. “Get the fuck away from me,” Hunter shoved him, hard. “Faggot.” Aaron hit his hip on the counter but said nothing, he’ll leave the bruise for Derek to find another night.

“I should say something to that pig,” Derek’s distracting himself with putting everything back in the bathroom the way it was before they came in. Straightening out the rug and fixing the other towels. “Let me catch him trying something--”

Aaron can’t take it, all of Derek’s pointless anger, his stupid guilt. He’s just had beer poured down his back. He can’t even accept Derek’s sweatshirt to replace his smelly shirt, can’t walk out of here wearing his boyfriend’s sweatshirt without getting shanked. The beer smells awful but he’s fairly certain getting stabbed is a whole lot worse. Derek doesn’t have to deal with that. No one messes with him because no one thinks to. “It’s because of how I look!” He’s shaking, bangs hanging down in his face still damp but no longer dripping water down his face. “You? You look normal. You get to walk around with all your football buddies, no one bats an eye at the quarterback, Derek. At least you like women too!” He points to himself, digs his finger into his own chest. “Me? I look the part. I can’t even pretend. Everyone knew, the whole world knew before I did!”

Derek just stands there, caught in the headlights trying to figure out what to say.

He wipes his eyes, jerks away from the hand Derek tries to put on his arm. “No. No!” he can’t do touch right now. Not like this, not when his body won’t hold still and his knees keep trying to buckle. It happens, this panicked cornered feeling, and usually Derek would hold him down. They’d sit on the floor and Derek would hold his arms down to his chest and they’d just sit like that until Aaron can breathe again. Bones against bones until Aaron feels the fractures of his humanity coming back together but for now, right now? He can’t do it. He can’t be touched.

“I want to go home,” he manages, lower lip quivering despite how much he wants to hold it together. “Please take me home.”

Derek just stares at him, stands there, and watches Aaron cross his arms over his chest and curl in, trying to squeeze the panic out himself. “Okay,” he caves. “Go on, I’ll follow you down.” It’s degrading, humiliating the fact that they can’t even leave this room together. Aaron’s upset and Derek can’t do anything about that right now. It’s not safe until they’re home.

It’s never safe.

With his hair dripping into his face Aaron stumbles in the dark. His shirt is soaking wet, stuck to his skin, and freezing him as tramples down a thin stretch of grass between houses. He wishes he had Derek’s sweatshirt. Something warm. At least something to cover his arms. It had been a stupid idea coming here right after getting off work. The bakery is so impossibly hot and after getting off his shift all he wanted was to be with Derek. To sit in whatever little room Derek could guarantee was safe and drink whatever cheap crap Derek brings him from downstairs. Just sit and listen to the music filtering in from downstairs.

“Hotchner!”

He freezes-- a deadly mistake.

“Where are you off to in such a hurry?”

He knows what happened to Derek. In the hush of the night, laying facing each other in the dark, Derek had told him. Each word a puff of hot air against Aaron’s face, hitting the hot tears rolling down his cheeks. It was supposed to be even, Derek’s intention was to express alikeness. He’d seen the scars, no matter careful Aaron was about the light when he thought things were headed in the direction of nakedness, Derek saw them. He hadn’t said anything that time, run his thumb over the one on Aaron’s chest but kept up his ministrations. Acted as if he didn’t until that moment in bed.

Aaron still hasn’t found the courage to be honest about his own childhood.

Derek comes around the back, half-expecting tonight to go like it always does. Except Aaron hasn’t had any alcohol and he doesn’t come stumbling around the porch to greet Derek from the darkness. There are no stolen kisses or hushed laughter. No Aaron. Derek has half a mind to shout out for him, he couldn’t have gone off far, but then he sees him. Derek sees them. The moonlight shining down casting this awful hue between the houses. He sees Hunter draw his foot back and he can’t hold it back. Won’t let this go on. “Hunter!”

The second that Hunter’s attention is away from him, Aaron slumps to the ground. His blood smeared against the house. He’s still breathing, awful ragged breathes that shoot blood off his lips. He sees Derek in the moonlight, rushing past him. Aaron wishes he wasn’t a coward. Between each blood speckled breathe, he wishes that he wasn’t a coward and had just told Derek. That way he would understand Aaron can take it. He spent his childhood taking beatings for just being alive. At least now it was something coherent. Being beaten for being gay requires at least knowing something about him. His father couldn’t even bother with that.

But Derek doesn’t understand.

Aaron never told him.

He’s pulled down, out of orbit, and back to Earth when Derek squats down beside him, cradles his head in his hands. “Aaron?” he calls out, but Aaron can’t force his eyes to move from the dirt. “Can I--” Derek doesn’t know where to put his hands. If he can put his hands anywhere. “I’m going to-- to lift you, okay?” It’s not a matter of if he’s strong enough. He benches more than his own body weight and that’s significantly more than Aaron’s. He’s just not sure if Aaron’s going to fight him and if Aaron fighting him is good or bad.

“Lean forward,” Derek whispers, cupping the back of Aaron’s head and directing it into his shoulder. He turns, manipulates both their bodies and winces each time, no matter how gentle and calculated his movements are, Aaron still cries out. He still hurts him. “I’m sorry,” becomes his mantra. The only words he can manage out around the tears, the only thing he can get past the thickness in his throat.

Sorry he didn’t stop this sooner.

Sorry that he keeps hurting Aaron.

Sorry they couldn’t be other people. In other places. In another time.

Sorry that it’s all for nothing, that there’s no way this ends well for either of them. They’re going to end up dead or alone but certainly separate.

The second Derek has him in his arms Aaron grips his shirt tightly in one blood-stained hand. He rests his head on Derek’s shoulder, soaking in his warmth. “Home?” he asks, voice breaking.

“We’re going home.”

Aaron wakes up alone in bed.

He’s completely naked, laying with three blankets pulled up over him. One that he recognizes is from the living room. There’s one of Derek’s homemade sock heating pads digging into his sore ribs where he rolled over onto it, he can feel more of them underneath him. He’s been laying here for a while. None of the socks are warm anymore. He’s on Derek’s side of the bed, facing his nightstand, and watches Derek’s blurry alarm clock change time. 1:36 passing to 1:37 to 1:38 just waiting for the fuzzy fingers in his brain to ease up. To allow him to think.

It’s Saturday.

Derek’s off at a football game, not due back for hours. Not until tonight, long after Aaron’s gone to bed.

For an overwhelming moment, his eyes fill with tears, desperation, and solitude creating an awful twist in his stomach. He doesn’t want to be alone. Protectively he draws his knees up, tries to knot himself up, and create a mangled ball. His heart picks up, anxiety increasing as he lays there. He wants Derek. He doesn’t want to be alone.

On the phone’s first rings he curls in tighter, overwhelmed by his own crying that he presses his face into Derek’s pillow and ignores it. He’ll let the machine catch it-- that’s the whole reason Derek bought it. With a sharp end, muffled by the blanket he pulls up over his head, a voice comes through. The machine catching the voice mail.

“Aaron, sweetheart? This is Fran, Derek’s mom? I’m sorry to keep calling sweetie but Derek’s awake now. He’s worried, says you should have woken up by now. I can send Sarah to come get you, Derek told me what happened last night. Please call me back? I hope you’re okay.”

He lays in confused silence, trying to process why Derek’s mother would call him. She calls all the time and occasionally he answers to tell her she’s just missed Derek-- he’s off with friends, at the gym, or at class. They know of one another Derek talks about him to Fran as much as Derek talks about Fran to him. But Fran call him? That’s never happened.

Then he catches it-- “Derek’s awake now”-- and he sits up. Pushed from his mind is the pain, his ribs scream and the blood he can see he’s left on Derek’s pillow. Derek’s awake now. Hunter Whatever-his-last-name-is is on the football team. An offensive lineman. A guy whose entire job is to protect Derek but now he knows, he has to know.

Derek’s awake now.

He throws himself out of bed, clipping his already sore hip on the nightstand and staggering for the phone. Tears spilling over his face. What happened while he was sleeping? What did Hunter do?

Fran picks up on the first ring. “Aaron, is that you sweetheart?”

He sniffles, rubbing at his nose with his finger. “Yes, ma’am.” He knows she can hear him crying, his choked sobs as he falls in the direction of the closes chair.

“You had me worried sick,” she says and he can hear that unmistakable fondness in her chastising tone. That must be where Derek gets it from. It makes him smile, even if it’s weak. “How are you feeling, baby? Derek told me what happened. I’m sorry. If I see that boy I’ll wring his neck. Give him a piece of my mind for bothering my boys.”

He just nods, despite the fact that she can’t see that. He knows he should answer her question but he has no idea what he feels. Nothing. He feels nothing as he sits here holding his breath as he waits to ask about Derek. To know what happened because of him. “Is Derek okay? What happened?”

Hunter told a few other team members what he saw. Most brushed him off, Hunters a douchebag, and they like Derek. Others just hate Aaron enough for it to matter to them, enough to what to do something. Or, rather, not do anything. It only took one tackle, a limb bent the wrong way under the weight of three boys.

It was Derek’s knee. A career-ending injury.

A scholarship losing injury.

“Can I--” Aaron chokes. He’s afraid of what happens if Fran says no. “Can I see him?”

“Of course you can.”

Aaron turns away Fran’s offer of a car ride but Desirée still shows up.

He answers the door in a sweatshirt and jeans and knows immediately who it is when he opens it up. Desirée just stares at him for a moment, he can feel all of the seventeen-year-old judgment sizing him up. “You look… awful,” she tells him. She lets herself in, walking past Aaron with one more look. “Mom says I can drive but if you want to do it I have to let you.” She puts the car keys on the counter, sighs as she looks around. “Derek says…” she chews her lip, as she sizes him up again.

He wonders how intimidating he could possibly look to her. Hunched over and wearing a sweatshirt that’s too big for him.

“Would you teach me how to make bread?”

He can’t help but smile, nods without any hesitation.

“Really?”

Aaron nods, “it’s not that hard. More of a-- a waiting game. You have to give the yeast time to rise.”

Desirée has no idea what that means but she nods, “cool.”

He lets her drive. Mostly because his vision is swimming but because he tosses the keys back to her, a clear okay that she can drive, and she beams at him. She likes him. That’s so weirdly important to him.

She has to wake him up when they get to the hospital. The first thing she tells Fran is that he let her drive and Fran smiles at him, shakes her head, and says “you must have a death wish.”

Aaron blushes under the attention, eyes falling to the floor. He barely manages, “drives just like Derek.”

Fran laughs, nodding her head, “she does. Too heavy on the brakes.” Her smile fades a little when she sees Aaron’s sweatshirt, recognizes it from home. Knows it’s Dereks. “Will you let someone look at that,” she asks, too many of his wounds look deep. Cuts that need stitches and a nasty black eye that she knows he hasn’t iced. She’s reminded a little too quickly that Aaron and Derek are still very much kids. Tricky kids. Too old to be told what to do but still wanting direction.

Aaron nods, shying away again from the attention, but nods.

They leave him when the nurse steps in, doesn’t need to say a word. Fran sees him hesitate to lift his shirt and knows. Derek had managed to tell her most of what happened but the morphine made his speech slur, made him emotional. He’d sobbed, high and in pain. Told her what he’d seen the night before. Hunter hitting and kicking at Aaron, the way Aaron slumped forward. How he’d carried Aaron home. Washed the blood off him with a rag. She knew what was under Aaron’s shirt wasn’t something for them to see.

Derek wakes sometime in the middle of the night. The drugs from the surgery are wearing off and with it his blissful escape from the pain. Licking his dry lips he looks around the room, spotting his sisters and frowning as he tries to find his mother. She’s leaning over another cot, on the other side of the room. He watches her, hears the familiar chorus of Blackbird, and watches her stroke Aaron’s forehead, following the line of the relaxed brow.

It makes him smile, his mother used to sing Whitney Houston to him and his sisters to sleep. He told her about Aaron’s obsession with The Beatles, how of all the records the two of them own that’s the only one Aaron will play. Desiréebought the album, his mother told him a week later. She saved up to get it and was eager for her moment to speak to Aaron about it. To be able to befriend her brother’s boyfriend. That’s about the same time Fran began to hound him about bringing Aaron home, to Chicago. She wanted to meet him.

Fran kisses Aaron’s forehead, waiting another moment just to make sure Aaron’s truly asleep before she stands. “He was having a bad dream,” she tells Derek. In truth, he’d been crying in his sleep. In pain, she could tell, and restless. He’d settled with her there and it made her sad to think that maybe he’d just grown too used to sleeping beside someone else. She’d pulled his blankets closer and sang, just as she did with the other three when they were little. Even when they’re twenty, it still works like a charm.

Fran smiles, tries to soothe Derek’s nerves so he doesn’t worry about Aaron. He’s fine for now, sleeping soundlessly. She sits down on the edge of Derek’s bed, cups his cheek, and asks “how are you feeling?”

Derek just looks over to Aaron, his pale parted lips parted and the bandages holding him together. “Is he okay?” He’d been so scared last night watching Aaron sleep. No amount of Tylenol was doing a thing for his pain. Several times he’d sat up in the night and searched for a pulse, counted the far too many seconds separating each of his breathes. Derek thought Aaron might die right there beside him but he’d been more afraid of what might have happened if they went to the hospital.

Fran sighs, stupid love. It’s cute, she has to admit, but so senseless. “He’s sleeping, he’s okay.” She tries to redirect him, “how do you feel?”

Derek looks back over to Aaron. He looks. There’s more than just those pale lips and the bandages. It’s Aaron. He’s sleeping under multiples blankets and looks like himself. How he always looks when Derek rolls over to face him. He believes his mother, she never lies. “My leg hurts,” he whispers, voice cracking. It’s like the entire thing is pulsing, a continuous stabbing feeling. He cries but not from the pain. They betrayed him. The people he so stupidly thought of as his friends. They hurt him like they’d been hurting Aaron.

He should have known better.

He shouldn’t have been so stupid.

This is his fault.

“Derek?” Aaron sits up, hesitating under the combined attention of Derek and Fran.

Fran stands up, nods Aaron over. “Sit with him,” she offers. “I’ll go get a nurse.”

Aaron nods, still waiting, still hesitating to be where he wants to be. Derek motions him closer, manages to move his body over in the bed. Just enough room for Aaron to squeeze in beside him.

“I don’t think I”m supposed to--”

“Lay down.” Derek can see all the bruises and cuts up close again. He brushes his fingers through the hair above Aaron’s ear, turning his palm to his cheek. Gently tracing the outline of a bandage. “Runaway with me,” he whispers. He thought about it all night long while he watched Aaron sleep. “There’s only four more weeks left of the semester.” Aaron’s smart, he’ll get in anywhere he applies. “We’ll transfer someplace else, anywhere else.”

Aaron frowns, he doesn’t like the idea of this impulsivity. Mostly the number of uncertainties that it creates and the questions. Where will they go? How will they know it’s safe? Are they dropping out? Where will they transfer to? What Aaron can’t get into the college that Derek does?

“Hey,” Derek hushes, he strokes his thumb across Aaron’s cheekbone. “Hey, whatever you’re thinking stop. I’m not leaving, not going anywhere you don’t. We do this together, alright?” He smiles, leans forward, and softly knocks their foreheads together. “Four weeks and all of summer break, okay? That’s plenty of time for a smarty pants like you to figure out where we can go.” It had taken less time for Aaron to conclude Illinois was close enough to home for him to go if something happened to his mother but too far away for her or his brother to come to him.

They’ll figure it out.

“Runaway with me?” he asks one more time.

“Okay.”

[sarahwilsonsupermacy]

Place for my heart part 2

Pairing : Bucky x Sarah Wilson

Bucky was playing with Cass and AJ while Sarah was preparing food for them with their neighbors, she was making fish on the grill while she was watching the man with her kids, she was sure the boys loved Bucky, he always made them laugh.

He really enjoyed the family time, he missed this. Now he could be himself again, the old Bucky that loved sport and games. He glanced over at Sarah which caused that the boys both jumped on him and he fell down in the grass, laughing. “Alright! I give up! You got me!” He said and got up evils holding up both of the boys.

“The food is ready!” Sarah called and he walked up to them, Sam was already there, sitting at the table. “Let’s take a bet on who’s going to fall asleep earlier today. Bucky or the boys?” He joked and looked over at Sarah. “Definitely Bucky. Cass and AJ are almost impossible to get tired” she said and gave everyone a plate with the food she made. Few neighbors sat with them as well.

“I agree on that” Bucky laughed softly and he began to eat, he loved it, Sarah was really an amazing cook. “Thank you, Sarah. It tastes so good” he said and then he turned to look at Sam.

.......

Sarah was having a lot of fun at the party. She was really glad that her brother was the Captain America. She was proud of him, he finally had what he deserved and he made a big step against racism with this.

Once the party ended, and everyone left, she began to clean the home. Once everything was cleaned, she opened the refrigerator, to get a slice of cake. She sat down at the table, on the balcony, as she ate, whole she was watching the view. The sea looked really pretty. She had a bright in her dark eyes. She would forget all her problems.

Bucky never felt more accepted and loved than at Wilson’s. They never judged him for his past and they seemed to like him.

The whole day he spent with them was fun, he was glad that Sarah and Sam invited him to the party. He would stay for few more days cause AJ and Cass convinced him to play baseball with them tomorrow. And he agreed even though he was pretty done from today, he really liked those two kids.

When Sarah was getting the cake, he was laying on the couch under a blanket and the light of the refrigerator coming from kitchen caught his eyes. He really wanted to be alone with her for a minute, without Sam’s strict big brother face so he got up and followed her to the balcony, he spoke calmly not to scare her. “It’s wonderful here..thank you for letting me stay” his blue eyes had its nice glow back, he felt joy again, after all those years he felt like a human again, thanks to their family.

To be honest, Sarah always liked bucky's presence. He was a great man, and he was really kind. AJ and Cass liked him too, they would call him Uncle bucky most of the time. She never saw her kids happy like that in years. And bucky was doing it extremely great.

Once she was there, she was jus thinking a lot of things. Their life changed a lot. And Sam wouldn't be a simple man. Now, he had a great title, and he deserved it.

She was keeping a silly smile in her face when he heard his voice. He gently looked up at the man, with a loving look. She admired the man, even tho she wouldn't admit that.

"Oh, hey. Yes, it's wonderful. And look, you don't have to thank me, Bucky. It's a pleasure having you here." She said calmly, and looked into his beautiful baby blue eyes.

"The party was really great. AJ ad Cass had a lot of fun with you, huh?" She chuckled and licked her bottom lip, as she took a sip of her juice.

“That’s really nice of you, really..I haven’t feel this accepted for decades honestly” the old man said and chuckled softly, he sat on a bench next to her and ran his betel hand through his hair.

He had that charming smile on his face, a happy smile. “The party was really great, I’m glad that I could be here with you, Sam and the boys. They’re great kids” he admitted

“But if I’m honest they gave me a pretty hard time today. They’re really full of energy. But it was fun, I’ll play baseball with them tomorrow. Would you maybe like to join us?” He asked and looked at her, his eyes meeting with hers.

He liked being called uncle Bucky, it was sweet and he felt like a part of a family he didn’t have for such a long time. And Sarah made it all even better, she was beautiful, kind, caring and she had something really great in her. She didn’t care about his past, she never judged him, she just took him the way he was.

“I hope you like that cake, I made it by myself. I finally got some stuff from my family, only one box but there was my moms book with recipes. So I dived into it” he said and smiled softly.

Sarah never imagined that she would meet a nice guy as bucky. And then, she did. She felt comfortable around him. Her eyes was brightening.

She rested her cheek on her hand, as she looked at him. She had a soft cans calm look. She was really peaceful— sure, she had her moments, stress and all. But when bucky was there, all the problems seemed to fade away.

"Oh, they are really energetic." She chuckled and put the plate with cake in her lap. Having someone new in home was comforting. And she trusted bucky. She knew she did.

"Wait, do you know how to cook? Wow." She said as she chuckled a bit. "Honestly, the savor is amazing! You did a great job. You are a great cook." She then took a bite of the cake. She hummed in satisfaction. She was telling the truth! The cake was really great.

"Oh! And- I would love to go with you. It would be good. And let me tell you something... AJ and Cass really like you. Their lives changed a lot since you appeared. And to be honest, my life too. You brighten this home, Bucky. And you are part of this family.

“I’m glad that you like it, it means so much to me” he said, his voice calm and deep, he really loved being around her. She made him feel safe, this whole house made him feel safe and calm.

“I like them too, I like all of you..you accepted me and I can never thank you enough..I haven’t feel this calm and accepted in such a long time..all thanks to you and your family” he said and looked at her again, she really was wonderful, her smile was radiating kindness.

Honestly, Bucky used to be great in all this, ladies loved him back in the 40’s but after everything he lost this game. But now, he felt like his old self again, like he could feel like that around a woman again.

Bucky always wished to have a family and a home, and now he had it all. Even though he didn’t live in Louisiana, he felt like it was a home.

[artificialqueens]

I Don't Know How I Know (But I Know) (Taywhora) - Ortega

fic summary: Tayce and A’whora have been friends for three years and the joke around school is that they’re joined at the hip. They started working there at the same time and they were both given the year two classes, so they planned together, filled out their assessment folders together and prepped for parent’s evenings together.

Tayce and A’whora have been friends for three years and Tayce has been a little bit in love with her for two of them.

(in which Tayce teaches year five, A'whora teaches Reception, Tayce hates Valentine’s day, and A'whora has a plan to change that.)

a/n: with thanks to my co-author, Lawrence Chaney. title from Intuition by LIZ, please listen to it it’s a vibe. happy valentine’s day everyone xo

***

Tayce has heard people say that teaching is a form of acting. She thinks this is true, for the most part. After all, there’s no way in hell she teaches her year fives the same way she would act around her friends.

She pretends she doesn’t know the TikTok dance to Savage Love and fakes ignorance at the memes her kids all communicate in. She’s impatient with her class when they run in the corridor and chew gum (because they’re almost the oldest in the school, and they should know better) but she’s patient when they struggle with area and perimeter and brings her chair over to sit beside whoever’s confused to explain it all again. She’s strict- she gets the girls passing notes to each other into trouble as if she didn’t do the exact same with her friends at the age of ten- and she’s built up a reputation for being one of the teachers that doesn’t take any shit. She expects a lot from the children she teaches, knows they’re a blank canvas and that they’ve got the potential to understand things that some adults struggle with, so she teaches them about racism, homophobia and transphobia, makes it part of her everyday teaching as opposed to one milquetoast lesson about Martin Luther King per year.

Some of the parents fucking hate her for it. She’d be lying if she said that wasn’t one of her favourite parts of the job.

It takes a lot for her not to drop that persona sometimes. When she has to tear through one of her boys for muttering “ah shit, here we go again” as she hands out a worksheet on direct and indirect speech instead of bursting out laughing as if it’s one of the funniest things she’s heard in years, which it is. It’s times like that when she wishes she could be more like A’whora.

A’whora with the blonde hair and the Disney-princess smile who teaches Reception. A’whora who does silly voices for all the characters when she’s reading picture books to her class and who sits and does colouring-in with them when they’re playing. A’whora who’s too nice to them all because she thinks they’re too cute to discipline, but her class love her so their behaviour is good regardless.

(A’whora with the completely inappropriate nickname only disclosed to Tayce five mojitos deep on the staff Christmas night out, which she’d earned herself at uni via her reputation. Tayce hadn’t asked for any further details.)

Tayce has never seen a teacher better suited to the youngest class in the school than A’whora. She’s constantly got specks of glitter on her face from the crafts she completes with them, she hums the silly little songs she uses to teach them their sounds when she’s at the photocopier without even realising. She turns up to work in immaculate outfits and finishes the day with them covered in glue, marker pen, and even (horrifically) a child’s snot once, but she doesn’t even mind, simply zips them up into little bodybags and puts them in for dry cleaning.

Tayce is never done telling her how she could never do what she does, she could never teach the little ones; her patience would snap, she’s too mean for them, she’d get bored having to teach the most basic of basic stuff. A’whora only ever brushes her off and says how she couldn’t teach Tayce’s year group either; they’d eat her alive, they’d walk all over her, she wouldn’t even be able to do the complicated maths she’d have to teach. Besides, she argues, drawing a glare from Tayce every time, she’s definitely goofy enough for the Reception kids.

Tayce and A’whora have been friends for three years and the joke around school is that they’re joined at the hip. They started working there at the same time and they were both given the year two classes, so they planned together, filled out their assessment folders together and prepped for parent’s evenings together. They worked well together, so when their headteacher sent them to opposite ends of the school Tayce almost had a meltdown. Still, they sit next to each other in the staffroom and at every staff meeting. They take turns making each other lunch every day and walk to the roll shop to get toasties every Friday. Tayce walks down from her classroom to come and sit in A’whora’s at the end of every day and they chat and bitch and sometimes cry and get absolutely nothing done for at least forty minutes. A’whora picks her up on the way to work every morning and terrifies Tayce with her bad driving and the way she almost causes road traffic accidents with only a “whoopsie!” of acknowledgement, but she’ll make up for it by taking them through the Starbucks drive-thru if they’ve got a meeting after school that night. She blasts songs by artists Tayce has never heard of but are all in the same energetic, poppy, Y2K-esque genre that A’whora seems to love.

Tayce and A’whora have been friends for three years and Tayce has been a little bit in love with her for two of them.

***

A’whora’s friends tease her and tell her that teaching five year olds must be the easiest job in the world. A’whora loves her friends, but she fucking resents them when they come out with that shite.

A’whora knows that she herself is not the brightest crayon in the box. She had known that she’d never be one of the girls in her year at high school that went off to study medicine or law, and she’d known she’d never graduate uni with a first class degree or write an award-winning dissertation.

(When she’s having a bad day she comforts herself with the fact that at least she’s not joined a multi-level-marketing scheme under the guise of being a “businesswoman”, and this helps her feel a little better.)

But what she lacks in academic ability she makes up for in spadeloads by being a damn good teacher. She’s big-hearted and silly and patient. She always picks up crisps and KitKats when she’s at the shops and keeps them in a drawer under her desk to sneak to the kids who come to school without a snack. She sits in the construction corner with her kids when they’re playing and asks them about the models they make, and pretends to die a gruesome, slow death when they shoot her with their little lego guns instead of trying to get them to make something less violent like she knows she should do. She reads books about unicorns that captivate the little shy girls in her class who come up to her afterwards and whisper in their tiny voices that they think unicorns are real, and A’whora agrees with them and watches their faces light up. She makes every day fun for her little ones; because the beauty of teaching is having the control to plan what happens every hour, so she makes sure that none of the six they have to spend in her care are boring.

The key to being a good Reception teacher is to essentially make a fool of yourself every day for the benefit of twenty-two four and five year olds, which A’whora has no problem doing. She doesn’t care what her pupil support worker thinks of her when she acts out The Gruffalo with soft toy puppets she borrowed from the library. She doesn’t care what the management team think of her when she turns up for World Book Day dressed as The Tiger Who Came To Tea. The only person’s opinion she does maybe care a tiny, ever-so-slight amount about, is Tayce’s.

Tayce is that teacher. Tayce is the cool teacher. Tayce is the teacher that all the children want to be taught by. A’whora hears the year fours whisper to each other in the corridors every June and watch as they cross their fingers and close their eyes before they open the envelope addressed to their parents, then give a screech of excitement and joy when they see the name Miss Szura-Radix on their class allocation letter. She wears heels all day without so much as a grunt of complaint and jumps in A’whora’s car each morning with a full face of makeup on at half past seven (while A’whora paints her face at quarter past eight at her desk in between shovelling a croissant down her throat in an attempt at ‘breakfast’ and sorting handwriting worksheets). The year five and six girls straighten their hair to a flattened crisp in an attempt to emulate Tayce’s endless shiny locks and she’s the only teacher that the rogue group of year six boys addresses with respect. She has the discipline of Miss Trunchbull with the heart of Miss Honey, and A’whora thinks she’s the best teacher she’s ever seen.

A’whora’s been friends with Tayce since she started working at the school but her heart still flutters in its chest whenever she sweeps in to her classroom to chat after work, or sits herself down next to her before a cluster meeting with two cups of tea in polystyrene mugs and two biscuits, or whenever A’whora mysteriously finds a packet of Percy Pigs on her desk hidden under a pile of marking with a post-it note stuck to it that says “u are a pig (but i love u)”.

She wonders if that feeling will ever go away. She kind of doesn’t want it to.

It’s that feeling that made her volunteer to help out at the year five camp last March. Tayce was complaining about having to go to a remote outdoor centre and supervise ten year olds completing various death-defying tasks for a week all in the name of character building, and A’whora had said she’d go with her. The smile it had put on Tayce’s face was worth every minute spent up to her knees in mud. Similarly every second she spent waist deep in freezing water was worth the moment Tayce fell asleep on her shoulder on the coach trip back to school on the last day.

(And she still hasn’t told anyone else about the moment she thought her heart might explode; on the last night of the week when temperatures had unexpectedly plummeted and A’whora had been trying to get to sleep but all she had been able to do was shiver and chatter her teeth and toss and turn, and Tayce had sighed dramatically, rolled her eyes, thrown off her duvet cover and patted the space in the bed beside her, with a “just get in quick, before it gets cold”. A’whora had spent the following hours until morning with Tayce’s body tangled around hers, in the most blissful sleepless night she’d ever experienced.)  

There’s so many things that endear Tayce to A’whora. Her smile, her secretly chaotic funny side, the way she never, ever makes A’whora feel like an idiot. The way she’ll ask the questions A’whora’s too scared to ask in staff meetings. The way she cares so deeply and passionately about the futures of the kids she teaches to the extent where sometimes she’ll develop a little crease at her brow in front of her attainment spreadsheet and A’whora will have to gently pry her away from her monitor to reassure her that she can’t control the way her children’s lives pan out. The way she’ll sometimes call her Rory, which makes A’whora’s heart expand at least three sizes.  

Something else that makes her heart expand three sizes is the way Tayce acts with the Reception kids, despite her insisting she could never teach that year group. It happens one day when A’whora’s marking literacy while letting her kids play and Tayce swings by her classroom without so much as a knock. They’ll do this to each other sometimes when one’s in class and the other has planning time; just drop by and check in to make sure the other isn’t having a meltdown.

“Hey bitchtits,” she murmurs quietly, smirking as she leans onto A’whora’s desk. “How’s your day going?”

“Terrible since you decided to show up,” A’whora cocks an eyebrow back, then jerks her head towards her distracted kids. “This lot are like sponges, y’know. You can’t be dropping that kind of language in this class, even if you think you’re out of earshot.”

Tayce sticks her tongue out at her. “Aw what, you gonna report me to management?”

“Report you to management and say you’re in my class annoying me during teaching time!”

“Piss off! I’m the highlight of your day and you know it.”

“Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?”

“No. Just some very lucky ladies,” Tayce bites back with a smile, instantly rendering A’whora’s cheeks beetroot red as if she’s been slapped.

“You’re horrendous. You’re an actual deviant. Olly Murs without the Pringles can,” she rolls her eyes, trying to style out how flustered she’s become. She can see Tayce open her mouth to shoot a comeback her way, which is why she’s glad when one of her boys appears beside her desk holding a crumpled piece of paper covered in crayon blobs which are clearly meant to represent objects.

“Hi Archie! You okay?” she smiles brightly, turning all her attention to the little boy and trying not to cringe at Tayce getting full view of her Cbeebies-presenter voice.

“I made a picture for you,” he says, showing her the piece of paper and pointing out all the features of his drawing with a chubby little finger. “It’s a dragon that breathes fire and bombs, and he’s called Squish.”

“Wow! Thank you, Archie, I love it!” A’whora keeps smiling, blinking at the drawing the boy’s still holding. She points at some shaky rectangles with a pink acrylic. “And I can see he must be really tall because those buildings are tiny underneath him!”

Archie’s no longer interested in her or the drawing, though, as he’s looking up at Tayce through his glasses. “You’re my brother’s teacher.”

“Am I?” Tayce says, surprised that the attention is suddenly on her. “Who’s your brother?”

“Joshua. Joshua White.”

Tayce’s face instantly lights up in recognition. “Of course, you’re Josh’s brother! I should’ve known, you look so alike.”

“He’s ten and I’m five,” Archie adds, somewhat unnecessarily.

“See, I think you might be taller than him, though,” Tayce deadpans. A’whora watches affectionately as Archie’s entire body crumples up in a laugh and he splutters out a “nooooo!”. Tayce’s face breaks out into a smile- warm and genuine with her nose wrinkling up. It’s maybe the most adorable thing A’whora has ever seen.

“Josh is good at art as well. He’s not quite as good as you, but he’s good,” Tayce smiles, and as Archie smiles back A’whora feels her heart melting.

Archie turns to Tayce suddenly with the drawing still in his hand, and holds it out for her to take. “This is actually for you.”

A’whora gives a snort of outrage and amusement, which she quickly turns into a cough. She watches as Tayce accepts the drawing gratefully, giving Archie a little squeeze on his shoulder as she says thank you and Archie scuttles away back to his friends all bashful. There’s a second where Tayce smiles after him then looks down at the drawing with fondness, and A’whora’s feelings for her hit her like a tidal wave.

Tayce doesn’t notice (because of course she doesn’t) and as she straightens up she grins triumphantly at A’whora, holding the drawing in her face proudly. “Well. Guess Archie’s got a new favourite teacher then, doesn’t he?”

“He wouldn’t last five minutes in your classroom,” A’whora smirks, lying. The image of big-hearted Tayce with a class full of the littlest kids drying their tears and helping them get all organised for the day ahead is so unbelievably cute it makes A’whora want to squeal like an embarrassing teenager. She doesn’t, though. Instead she holds out a hand expectantly, raises her eyebrows at Tayce as if she’s one of her students. “Am I getting my drawing back or what?”

“Easy come, easy go,” Tayce winks at her, flouncing out of her classroom door just as the bell rings for break.

***

Tayce doesn’t really flirt with A’whora. Well, no, that’s a lie. She flirts and then immediately laughs it off, brushes it off as a joke or banter even though maybe if she’d taken flirting with A’whora a little more seriously she wouldn’t still be in this position two-bloody-years in.

Because she knows A’whora flirts sometimes. She’s positive she isn’t making it up. The way she’ll deadpan a “well, you look like shit” as she hops into her car in the mornings, the way she’ll sit close to her under her fluffy pink blanket if she’s round at Tayce’s for a movie day (because yeah, they hang out outside of work, because that’s what friends do). It’s always a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it raised eyebrow here, a laugh there, a touch of her arm and a squeeze of her hand and a smirk that bites back a thousand words Tayce wishes A’whora would just say.

So Tayce will flirt back because that’s probably just what A’whora does with her friends, and that’s all Tayce is to her. Maybe. Tayce is never sure if A’whora likes her back or not, and the risk of completely wrecking what is her only workplace friendship is too great to actually do something about it, so she’s happy being her friend for now. Every second she gets to spend with A’whora is a treat, so she can’t complain.

It would be easier if she was still labouring under the delusion that A’whora was straight, which was the whole reason it took Tayce so long to start slowly falling for her. A’whora had had a boyfriend for roughly the first six months Tayce had known her, so she hadn’t even thought of her friend in that capacity at all. Then one day on a rainy January she’d thudded her bag down on Tayce’s desk and told her they were going for drinks after work that night because her boyfriend was a cheating piece of shit and she’d broken up with him.

Tayce’s fate had further been sealed when they’d been sitting together for an inservice day on LGBT training and A’whora had turned to her and rolled her eyes.

“We don’t really need to be here, do we? We could just piss off to McDonalds.”

Tayce had laughed softly, fixing A’whora with a slightly confused glance. “Huh?”

“Well, I feel like we probably have enough lived experience of the whole thing to not need training. Still, we could always duck back in in time for the transgender part. But I mean we probably don’t really need to be told how to support kids struggling with their sexuality, do we?”

Tayce still remembers how A’whora had snorted at her, her face obviously looking as if she was searching for the last puzzle piece in the world’s most confusing jigsaw. “What is it?”

“I don’t get…what?” Tayce had said awkwardly, still unsure of what A’whora had meant.

A’whora had pulled a face, giggling a little. “Are you telling me that rainbow flag is on your desk for shits and gigs?”

“No…” Tayce said slowly, the pieces slowly falling together. “So…”

A’whora gave another funny little snort. “Tayce, did you not know I was bi? I’m sure I’ve told you this before.”

Tayce still thinks she deserves an Oscar for still being able to keep the conversation going despite the fact her entire world had been flipped on its head like a globe made of hourglass. “You’ve not! You’ve never. I mean, like, why would you need to? It’s not something that matters. I mean obviously it matters to you, but it doesn’t matter to me. You’re my friend either way. I mean it just never occurred to me because…your ex, and uh…you can drive.”

Mercifully, their headteacher had started speaking before A’whora could respond to her beyond a single raised eyebrow and a smirk on her face.

It’s been ever since then that Tayce has been looking at A’whora in a different light. How gorgeous she is at the start of the day with nothing but her laminated brows and lash extensions to pass for makeup and how gorgeous she still is at the end of the day with her mascara and eyeliner smudged a little at the edges and her lipstick all rubbed off. How she’s generous and patient and how she’ll go out of her way to help Tayce understand the new flavour-of-the-month resource their headteacher makes them use, pulling one of her kid’s chairs over to sit close beside her to see the monitor and bumping her knee against Tayce’s every so often.  

It’s how she acts around her kids, though, that really highlights everything Tayce completely adores about A’whora. Tayce is on her way up to the staffroom with two tubs of chicken shawarma salad in her hands (one for her and one for A’whora, of course) and she makes it up one flight of stairs when she suddenly hears a cry like an air raid siren pierce the air, as well as a gentle, soothing voice muttering quiet consolations.

It’s the sheer hysterical nature of the crying that catches Tayce’s attention at first, and she looks over the bannister to see A’whora on the level below, sitting a little boy who’s bawling his eyes out down on the red squashy chairs outside the office. With a stab to her heart Tayce realises that it’s Archie, the boy who’d given her the picture all those weeks ago. Both his knees and the palms of his hands are torn to ribbons; he’s obviously had a fight with the tarmac and emerged the loser. Tayce knows he’ll be okay if an adult’s seeing to him, especially if that adult’s A’whora, so she knows she can leave. She doesn’t need to stay and watch the situation play out.

But she does. She watches as one of the ladies from the office comes out and reassures A’whora that she can take over, and as A’whora waves her away kindly and says it won’t take her two minutes. She watches as A’whora puts her hands on the boy’s shoulders and directs his breathing, talking to him calmly and softly. She watches A’whora rip into a packet of sterile wipes with grim determination, telling Archie how brave he’s being and that she knows it stings as she wipes quickly and carefully over his little cut hands. She watches A’whora peel the wrapping off four plasters, making it seem effortless even with her long acrylics, and the way she makes a joke about Archie being bandaged up like a mummy which brings a smile to his little tear-stained face and a smile to Tayce’s too. The other staff don’t get to see A’whora’s caring nature very often (given how often she whispers judgemental comments to Tayce during meetings) but Tayce sees it all the time. A’whora has the biggest heart of anyone she’s ever known, and the whole scene makes Tayce feel so endeared towards her that it almost frightens her.

It’s at that point when Archie looks up at Tayce on the bannister and makes eye contact with her. He flicks his eyes back down to his teacher.

“Uh, Miss Boyle? I think Miss Szura-Radix wants to talk to you, because she’s been there a long time.”

Tayce’s heart freezes solid at the same time A’whora turns around, who fixes her with a sort of funny smile, confused but not exactly unhappy to see her.

“Uh. Coming to the staffroom?” Tayce shouts down, under pressure to explain herself but simultaneously not having any explanation.

“Two seconds!” A’whora yells up apologetically.

“I’ll wait,” Tayce yells down, reassuring her.

Tayce is used to waiting for A’whora. She supposes another minute or so won’t make a difference.

***

This is the third Valentine’s day A’whora has spent with Tayce.

The first fell on a Monday and had been an abject disaster (or success, depending on how she looked at it). A’whora was still getting over her ex and Tayce had confided in her that she hated Valentine’s day and all its commercialised, capitalist tat with a burning passion, so they’d gone to the pub after work and got so outrageously drunk that the two of them were so hungover the next day A’whora drove them to McDonalds for lunch.

The second had been last year- a Tuesday, where Tayce had been subdued and a little down until A’whora had forced her into helping her choose new clothes for the roleplay area for her kids and the pair of them had collapsed into endless breathless giggles as they both tried on costumes made for five-year-olds, the memory of Tayce in a hi-vis vest, safety goggles and a tiny hard hat one that still makes A’whora laugh if she thinks about it.

Really she’s lucky that she gets to be one of the few people who’s spent the 14th of February with their crush for three years in a row, but not for the reasons she might want. Still, she can live in the delusional daydream she’s taunted herself with many times; how maybe today Tayce will turn up at her classroom door with helium balloons and a teddy, how she’ll say she’s been secretly in love with her for years and how she’s booked them a table at that fancy seafood restaurant in town that just opened up for an actual proper date (not a mate date and not some gal-entines or pal-entines bullshit).

And then Tayce hops into her car in a foul mood with her hair drenched from waiting for A’whora in the rain with no umbrella and a face like a cow’s backside.

A’whora tries to cheer her up. She blasts the R&B that Tayce loves but Tayce just asks her to turn it off, telling her that Kiana Ledé, Mahalia and Ella Mai are exactly what she doesn’t need to hear on Valentine’s Day, endless songs about being in and out of love. So A’whora blasts Charli XCX instead, which works well until shuffle puts on Forever, and then Tayce is in the huff again.

Teaching the year fives doesn’t exactly help her feel much better, A’whora thinks, as they both sit down to lunch together and Tayce turns to her with an incredulous scowl on her face.

“They’ve all got bloody boyfriends and girlfriends!”

A’whora stops eating the pasta salad Tayce has made for her and narrows her eyes inquisitively. “Who does?”

“All the kids in my class. They’ve been going around all day telling me who they’ve paired up with, who’s snogging who, the detailed dating history of these bloody ten year olds. They keep asking me what we’re doing for Valentine’s Day. ‘Are we making cards?’ No! We’re doing more work on decimals because none of you bloody understood it the first three times I explained it to you. Make a card in your own damn time,” Tayce rolls her eyes while A’whora snorts with laughter. Tayce side-eyes her, unimpressed as A’whora tries to defend herself.

“Oh come on, Tayce, you’ve got to admit it’s a bit funny.”

“Is it? Is it though? Is it funny that a ten year old boy can get himself a girlfriend but I can’t?”

Tayce’s words make A’whora’s heart jump a hurdle. She plays it off with a joke. “Yeah, but he’s got a ten year old girlfriend, Tayce. I’m assuming you don’t want that.”

“No, funnily enough!” Tayce shakes her head. She pouts uncharacteristically, tilting her head to the ceiling. “I just…I don’t know, I just want someone that’s there for me. Who’ll always listen to all my shit, someone that makes me smile when I feel like crap. Someone I can just be myself around and have a laugh with whatever the hell we’re doing.”

A’whora nods and doesn’t say what she wants to. We do that. We do all of that together already.

“But I don’t want all the shit of having to actually get to know people, having to go on dates and do the whole talking stage and get my hopes up only to have them let down. I wish I could just…” Tayce sighs, and A’whora’s on tenterhooks wondering what’s coming next. “…I wish I just already had that person, you know?”

You do have that person. I’m that person.

A’whora nods silently and the bell rings signalling the end of their lunch break.

Since she’s not as enraged by Valentine’s day as Tayce, A’whora has planned to get the sequins and glue out and get the kids to make Valentine’s cards. She loves planning tasks like this, mainly because five year olds don’t need much help when faced with a glue stick and a shaker full of glitter, so it means she can put her feet up and have a chilled afternoon. She explains to her class what they’re going to be doing, feels her heart burst with affection as they all get outrageously excited at the very notion of using glitter. She shows them how to fold their piece of paper carefully to make a card shape, and shows them the array of colours they can choose from (and has to explain to some disappointed boys that no, she doesn’t have any blue card so no, their Valentine’s Day card can’t be the colour of Crystal Palace football club).

She’s giving out the different colours of card to her kids and cutting them to size when one of her girls stops, peers carefully at the selection of colours, then looks at A’whora thoughtfully.

“Miss Boyle, are you going to give a Valentine’s card to Miss Szura-Radix?”

A’whora almost slices through her own hand in shock. She looks with incredulity at the little girl in front of her. “Bella! No, of course not. Why would I do that?”

“Because you’re best friends and you love her,” Bella shrugs, A’whora’s attempts to shame her into silence obviously having no effect. A’whora tries to scowl, tries to do her best ‘cross face’ despite the fact that the thought of giving Tayce a Valentine’s card sets her heart racing so fast it makes her genuinely think about driving to A&E.

“I don’t…” she starts, until Bella speaks again.

“You told us before that girls can fall in love with girls and you said that we can make our Valentine’s cards for our friends too,” she insists innocently. A’whora finally musters up a frown, thrusts a pink piece of card into her hand.

“Why am I even entertaining this conversation- go and get on with your work, madam!” she says firmly, and Bella walks away with her blank card in her hand, nonplussed.

But as her kids all begin to make their cards and they’re all too caught up in glitter and painting their hands with PVA glue to even need her help with anything, A’whora begins absent-mindedly folding a spare piece of pink card in half. She draws one, two, three love hearts on it, then takes one of the little glue sticks and carefully, neatly, fills them in with splodges of clear glue. She asks one of the little boys sitting at the table opposite her if she can borrow the red glitter when he’s finished with it and he nods his head, A’whora’s heart involuntarily swelling with pride at how good her children are at sharing. She tap-tap-taps the glitter shaker over the hearts on the paper, making sure each one is covered completely before standing the card upright and watching the excess fall off like sparkly snow. Opening the card, she takes the gold shiny gel pen from her desk and writes without really thinking it through.

Maybe if Tayce isn’t going to magically read A’whora’s mind and figure out what she’s been yearning for, A’whora just has to give her a little nudge in the right direction.

When she’s done she folds it back over, stands up, crosses the room to her empty yellow message folder and slides it inside. She asks her class if anyone knows where the year five classroom is because she’s got a message to send there. Fifteen tiny hands fly up and A’whora basically has to whittle the volunteers down to the only two kids who actually know where they’re going, and she gives them the folder and tells them to take it up to Tayce’s classroom.

She doesn’t think about the reality or the implication of what she’s just done, because if she does then she’ll start hyperventilating and not stop until perhaps June of next year. Instead she catches the eye of Julia, the little girl who moved from Poland in January. She can’t speak or write a word of English yet, but the way she’s looking at A’whora with a little smile on her face makes her genuinely wonder if she knows. Sometimes kids can pick up on these sorts of things. She shoots her a little wink and puts her finger to her lips in a “shhh” just in case, and the little girl breaks into a grin that shows two missing front teeth.

The thing about teaching is that it’s a great job for providing a distraction. A’whora can’t think about the card she made for Tayce when she’s cleaning up an entire pot of glitter that Jared spilt all over the carpet, nor can she think about what she’s written in it when she’s comforting Angelica because she didn’t get to finish her card in time for hometime. But the moment she’s waved the kids off and dropped them off to their parents she walks up the stairs from the front entrance with an impending sense of dread which only increases with every new step she takes.

“What the fuck have you done,” she mutters under her breath, earning her a weird look from one of the ladies at the office.

When she gets back to her classroom to find Tayce sitting on one of the tiny tables waiting for her, A’whora feels her heart freeze in her chest and the blood rush to her face, blushing just from seeing her there. Tayce looks in a better mood than she was at lunchtime, though, which is a good start. Maybe she never even read the card. Maybe A’whora’s reception kids took it to the entirely wrong class. Christ, that would be even more embarrassing.

“Hey, boo boo,” Tayce smiles gently at her, as A’whora crosses the room and elects to sit on the desk opposite her so they’re face to face and not too far away. “How’d your afternoon go?”

“Oh, uh, y’know,” A’whora stammers out, blundering her words in the world’s worst attempt at appearing nonchalant. “Lots of glitter, lots of PVA. In fact I’m probably sitting in a massive glittery splodge of it, as are you.”

Tayce laughs, checks the table comedically.

“How was yours? You seem a bit more cheerful,” A’whora continues, looking to the floor and not darling to meet her eyes. “Did decimals finally click with your lot, or…?”

“I am a bit more cheerful,” Tayce smiles, A’whora’s heart racing and soaring in anticipation at the same time. “But not really anything to do with decimals. More to do with the fact somebody made me a really very lovely Valentine’s card.”

Tayce reaches behind her back and produces her card- A’whora’s card- from the table behind her, and A’whora feels her pulse race at her wrists and her heart leap into her mouth to the extent that she’s rendered almost too shy to speak. What the fuck was she thinking? Tayce is probably about to rip the piss out of her for it, it was a huge mistake, and she’s probably thrown their whole friendship away for nothing.

However. There’s a little something in Tayce’s eyes, a little sparkle that makes the grey shine silver. So A’whora shrugs, fixing a carefree smile on her face even though she feels anything but.

“Well, I know you hate Valentine’s day, so…I thought maybe if I gave you a card you’d stop being so mardy about it.”

When she looks at Tayce again she can see there’s a little crack in her perfect armour, the sparkle in her eyes dulled slightly. When she speaks her voice is quiet and nervous, so stripped of its usual hyperactivity and energy that A’whora wonders if it’s even Tayce’s voice at all. “Is that, uh. Is that the only reason you made it?”

A’whora can practically feel herself clam up. She has no idea where Tayce is going with this; to clarify that it was a joke or to clarify that it was serious, and A’whora doesn’t know which one Tayce wants it to be.

“What you wrote,” Tayce continues, her gaze fixed on the glitter-covered carpet and making it even more impossible to figure out her intention. “Was that, like…some girly besties chat, or was it…did you mean it…like that?”

“Yeah, I did,” A’whora says instantly. It’s out before she knows it, a terrifying leap into a freezing cold conversational plunge pool with no life raft to help her climb out. There’s only one way out and it’s Tayce’s reaction, whatever the hell that might be. She snapped her head up the moment the words left A’whora’s mouth, and her eyes are wide in what could be shock but could quite easily be horror.

A’whora doesn’t think she’s ever been more hopeful and frightened all at once. The seconds tick by and Tayce is still frozen in position, and A’whora can literally feel herself inching closer to the edge of the desk in terrified anticipation.

“Jesus Christ say something, Tayce, before I cringe myself to death,” she says breathlessly, her blood feeling almost electric as it races in her veins.

Tayce leans forward, not giving much away as she brings a thumb up to A’whora’s cheek.

“You’ve got a bit of glitter on your face,” she murmurs.

When she leans in and closes the gap between them, A’whora feels herself melt against Tayce’s lips with relief. They’re in the middle of her classroom at quarter part three with the door open and she’s very well aware that anyone could walk in at a moments’ notice, but A’whora doesn’t care. A’whora only cares about the fact that Tayce is kissing her and she’s kissing back, and it’s so hard to believe it’s actually real and not some daydream come to life, and it’s happening on Valentine’s day which makes it even more far-fetched. But every time A’whora starts to think that maybe she’s dreaming she feels Tayce’s thumb stroke her cheek, or their knees bump together, or she brings a hand up to rest at Tayce’s jaw just to make sure it’s all real.

When Tayce pulls away and they smile at each other, giggling and blushing like one of Tayce’s year fives, A’whora only allows herself to properly believe it’s all actually happening when Tayce presses their foreheads together, takes both of A’whora’s hands in her own and murmurs quietly to her what A’whora’s wanted to hear for entirely too long.

“I love you too.”

[ofdreamsanddoodles]

if you don't mind me asking, how do you deal with consuming content with 'problematic' aspects? for example, i see you reblog posts criticizing things like racism in tma, and you can still make content while being able to recognize those things. it's hard for me to continue enjoying something when it has even 1 thing slightly bad in it, but i know that's not a healthy way to consume content. is there anything you keep in mind when interacting with a given series? u don't need to answer ❤️ ty

also a note on my ask -- of course you don't need to answer, and you aren't a therapist & etc. i just admire your ability to both recognize flaws in works but still enjoy them, and thought since you seem to have critical thinking skills you might have a perspective that you could offer. being on tumblr from a young age seems to have affected my ability to separate things in my mind, lol. thanks so much for reading even if you don't feel comfortable answering.

I mean... you’ve kind of answered your own question? The only way to consume media is to remember that everything has flaws. My brother came by while I was typing this up and told me the answer is to “just vibe” because everyone is more or less terrible in one aspect or another but obviously, that’s not the answer you’re looking for.

I guess the short answer is just... you have to learn how to trust your own set of morals and understand that you shouldn’t feel guilty if a story you like betrays you. And yes, that’s hard, especially when you grow up surrounded by very rigid rules on what’s “okay” to watch, but if you’re just looking for some tips, here’s a list that I hope will help:

Find people you trust and see what they think of the situation. Think about whether or not they’re coming from an informed place. A friend of mine asked me if I knew about a Jewish tradition a while back. I had no idea what they were talking about. Turns out, it was something popular with German Jews. None of my family is from Germany. Sometimes, just being Jewish doesn’t mean I’m the right person to ask.

Find people who are complaining & see why they’re upset. Think about who is annoyed by this and how many of them there are. Think about what they think the proper response is, if any. Think about whether you have the right to wave off their concerns. Think about how those concerns are treated, both in-fandom and by creators. I saw a lot of people in the tma tag complaining about twitter “overreacting” to MAG 185, but if Jonny felt the need to issue an apology and specifically say that he realizes he’s crossed a line, chances are, the complaints were probably warranted (a thing I’d like to add is that apparently, RQ also issued an apology for a fluff episode they released, which I thought was kind of silly, because the episode was essentially just joking about martin forgetting a word. But also, as a neurodivergent person who sometimes struggles with speech, I do understand why that might upset people. not all apologies have to about incredibly important topics, but even the ones who aren’t show a lot about the cast behind it. Alternatively, if RQ had only apologized for this episode, and not MAG 185, that also says a lot about where there priorities are, and what fans they care about keeping)

Think about what will happen if you continue watching/reading etc. It’s not so much “is it okay if I keep watching this?” but “if I continue to watch this, will I convince myself that this problematic aspect isn’t actually a big deal? Is it so ingrained in the show that I can’t watch an episode without seeing the problems in it? What will I say to others, if they want to watch this?” For example, if someone sees you’ve reblogged a scene from a show you like and asks what it’s about, how many excuses are you going to give? How many trigger warnings are there, and can you justify them? There’s a difference between a piece of media having a character say homophobic slurs, and a piece of media saying a gay person should have homophobic slurs thrown at them.  Also: If you think you cant justify getting someone else interested, you probably shouldn’t justify contributing to the show. This might be obvious, but there’s a very big difference in pirating a tv show and buying its merch. 

Think about the fandom. If you continue talking about this, who are you surrounding yourself with? Like, there are a LOT of weirdos making content for kids shows, but that doesn’t always mean the show itself is weird. What it does mean, though, is that you should be careful navigating your enjoyment. Sometimes, the only way to enjoy something is to talk about it with a select few friends. Sometimes, it’s to enjoy it by yourself. I do believe it’s possible to enjoy a show in spite of the canon, but at the same time, if you’re watching a show that’s attracting a lot of racists, think about why that might be. 

some more thoughts under the cut, because I already wrote them out before I realized I could just make a list.

The thing about consuming media is that it’s very subjective. I know a lot of people who have given up on tma recently and while that’s not wholly because it’s “problematic,” it definitely plays a part in it. People have different meters for what they can excuse in media. The important thing to remember is WHY they left, and if you’re able to keep that in your mind while also continuing to engage in contact with the media. Will you be able to remember that Daisy traumatized Jon more than any other avatar if you consume context calling her Basira’s hot murderwife? Can you talk about the Flesh and acknowledge the racism in the creation of the Haans?

Personally, I don’t think you can produce positive content about Daisy and also acknowledge the harm she causes. You can’t point at a character and say, yes, she has committed actual police brutality, but I think she deserves a cute lesbian romance anyway. That’s not really a thing tma has done wrong as much as it is a problem with the fandom, but like, at the end of the day, it’s all just a matter of critical thinking. Who is being hurt by these portrayals of the characters? How? Most of the problems with tma aren’t things that are, like, baked into the actual worldbuilding and for a lot of people, that’s enough for them to still justify making content for the show.

If your complaints sound like “oh, if only they didn’t do xy, this would make for a good show,” then you’re probably fine. But if it goes into “i like this, but only if I can ignore (major plot point)” think about why you feel the need to keep watching. There are shows I’ve stopped watching based on principle. There’s manga I read that I only talk about with my brother and no one else, because I don’t want to be exposed to the fans. It doesn’t have to be as simple as “well, this artist did a bad thing, so now I’m going to ignore it forever.” If you think the creators of something are bad people, don’t support them. You can still pirate it or whatever, but if it’s something like hetalia, where the point of the show is just “let’s put all these stereotypes in a room and see how they react” then yes, for your own sake, you should stop watching because this is how stereotypes become normalized, and no one should be consuming media where nazi germany as the protagonist.

Really, at the end of the day, it’s just a matter of becoming media literate and that’s a process that takes time. Remember that being interested in something that isn’t 100% doesn’t make you a bad person, and listen to the people around you. Try and be a safe space for the people who do have complaints and remember not to place your enjoyment of something over the comfort of others. Other than that, just... do your best, I guess?

[tahitianmangoes]

The story of Clementine Quinn

I literally spent all morning just writing this. I usually can’t just sit down an write like this and it turned out more like a mini fic(?) than a biopage but I hope it’s ok!

@fangirl-ramblings​ I know you were interested in seeing it too so I’ll tag you here ^^;;;

Zhang Xiaomeng was nineteen when he came to America from Harbin in China looking for a better life. He had heard of the promise of the Golden Mountain and hoped to work enough to get his family out of the debt that his own father had put them in through his drink and gambling addictions.

Xiaomeng arrived at Angel Island after a long and treacherous  boat ride with many other Chinese, Japanese and Filipinos only to find that America wasn’t a land of freedom, nor was it paved with gold… At least not for him and other non whites.

Americans wanted cheap Chinese labour to do the jobs they would never dream of doing, so he began working just outside of Annesburg building a railway with other Asian immigrants.

The labour was backbreaking and many of his friends collapsed due to exhaustion and malnutrition. Some ran away but if caught, they would be beaten and not be permitted food or water as a punishment. Xiaomeng saw many of his friends die. It hardened him. He realised that the life he had chosen here had been a lie.

Determined to live, he took his opportunity to escape one night when the guards were drunk and ran away to Saint Denis. There had to be more to life here than building railroads. 

Xiaomeng hoped that Saint Denis would be different and in many ways it was. He was able to find lodgings with other Chinese people and made friends. But the fear, segregation and racism hadn’t gone away. With American swept away in an ocean of yellow peril, Xiaomeng would often find himself being chased or attacked in the street with no one batting an eyelid. Chinese people who owned businesses had them burnt down and it was common for someone to not return home and never be seen again. 

Xiaomeng had made friends with a young Chinese man who worked washing pots in a restaurant but one day, he stopped showing up for work. Xiomeng found that there was little use going to the police for help. They didn’t care about the likes of Xioming and other immigrants; they made fun of his broken English and thick Chinese accent and told him to get out before they threw him in a cell. 

Saint Denis is where Xiomeng met Clementine’s mother.

He was able to find work in a general store whose owner took pity on the poor immigrant boy. Xiaomeng promised he would work harder than any white person the owner had ever employed and he made good on his promise. Xiaomeng did everything from cleaning the store and the storefront, riding out to get supplies, making sure the shelves were always full and appealing  and delivering goods in and around Saint Denis to customers. 

Elizabeth Quinn, the daughter of a wealthy Irish-American family who owned properties in Saint Denis and Blackwater.

Elizabeth was sheltered and inexperienced, never having left Saint Denis. She grew up with a governess and was distant with her parents whom she didn’t see too often. By the time she was eighteen, her family had made an agreement with another family in Blackwater who had an unmarried son of thirty-three named Lewis Clark. The Clark family had made their money in the cotton trade but now owned a mining company in Annesburg.

Elizabeth had never met Lewis. She hated the idea that she wasn’t marrying for love and was marrying a man who was almost double her age. It was a transaction and she wasn’t an item to be sold.

The arrangement was purely monetary; Elizabeth’s father would allow Lewis to marry his only daughter in exchange for partnership in the mining business and other business ventures in Blackwater.

Elizabeth met Xiaomeng when he began delivering goods from the general store to her home a few times a week. 

She was struck by how handsome he was, he was lean from the manual labour. His jet black hair was worn long but tied back so that Elizabeth could see his face, his skin a golden brown and his eyes a shimmering amber. 

She had never really met anyone from outside the house before other than the people who were invited around for her parents parties but none of them looked like Xiaomeng .

Xiaomeng was also struck by Elizabeth’s beauty. Elizabeth had long red hair and bright blue eyes, she was slender and graceful - beauty without contrivity. 

Xiomeng was so enraptured by her that he dropped everything he was carrying when he first saw her in the gardens as he made his way to the back door where the kitchens were. Glass shattered and the contents spilled all over the floor causing a commotion. Elizabeth stepped in and took the blame, knowing that Xiaomeng would be punished harshly if she told the truth.

Xiaomeng had a kind smile and while he didn’t speak English well and Elizabeth didn’t know a word of Chinese, there was most definitely something between them that neither of them could explain, like the world was pushing them together.

Elizabeth made sure she was always in the garden for when Xiaomeng came with his delivery. 

The pair started a secret relationship, Xiaomeng would slip Elizabeth little notes that the wife of the general store owner would help him compose and Elizabeth would write letters in return that she spritzed with her perfume. Xiaomeng kept all of the letters, the only thing that had any value to him in this world.

On Xiaomeng notes, he would tell Elizabeth when he days off were and Elizabeth would meet him in town. Many places wouldn’t let Xiaomeng in, so they would walk to the edge of Saint Denis by the water and talk. Sometimes, they would go back to Xiomeng’s house which was usually empty during the day but sometimes, the other people he shared with were there and Elizabeth soon became friends with them. Neither Xiomeng or Elizabeth understood the other too well to begin with but with but love has its own language.

Soon, Elizabeth fell pregnant. The pair knew they didn’t have long to figure out what to do - the engagement to Lewis was to be announced soon. Xiaomeng wanted to run away with Elizabeth; he promised her he would always take care of her and their baby, no matter what: they’d get married and live happily. But both knew that with the exclusion act, they would never be allowed to marry or live any sort of normal life.

Maybe it had all just been a silly dream which was rapidly turning into a nightmare…

Elizabeth began to show, despite trying to cover her bump with baggier clothes but it was fruitless; one of the men who worked for Elizabeth’s father had seen Elizabeth with Xiaomeng in town one day. 

The word got to her father who flew into a rage. Still worried about his business plans, he tried to arrange for a doctor to “take care of things” but by this time, word had reached Lewis Clark and his family in Blackwater and the engagement was promptly called off.

Elizabeth pleaded with her father but he went to the store where Xiaomeng worked with some of his men, dragging him into the street by his hair and proceeded to beat him in front of everyone saying that this filthy chinaman, this filthy dog had defiled his daughter and ruined his business. Xiaomeng couldn’t fight back, he was outnumbered and no one would step in to help - he knew that.

They kept beating and beating until the dusty road turned crimson and Xiaomeng’s handsome face was no longer recognisable. He crumpled lifelessly to the floor where he lay motionless, Elizabeth’s father didn’t stop, he stamped on Xiaomeng’s head until there was a sickening crack and then silence.

The crowd quietened and soon dispersed, leaving only Elizabeth at the foul scene, howling and weeping for her one true love. 

Elizabeth knew she had to leave. She was terrified that when the baby came, her family would take it away from her - her last part of Xiaomeng.

Clementine was born in 1873  somewhere in Tall Trees where she had a fairly happy childhood. She liked nature and animals, Elizabeth doted on her and they spent many happy days in their small homestead not too far from a dam where they would fish. Elizabeth would sell the fish in Strawberry, it didn’t pay a lot but it kept them clothed and fed. 

When Clementine was thirteen, Elizabeth became ill. Dysentery. She told Clementine to go to a woman she had met in Strawberry who would take care of her - when Elizabeth was better, Clementine could come back. Only Elizabeth didn’t get better and she knew she never would.

Clementine never saw her mother again.

Clementine went to Strawberry to find the woman whose name was Miss Burgess. Miss Burgess was in her sixties or so and was a mean woman. Clementine worked for her for a while cleaning houses owned by rich, fancy folk. It was hard work and Clementine barely saw a penny once Miss Burgess had taken her share.  Clementine shared a room with several other girls and boys around the same age who all worked for Miss Burgess. Clementine didn’t make any friends in that time and remembered crying herself to sleep many nights on the itchy bedroll she slept on on the cold floor of that room.

By the time she turned fourteen, Miss Burgess decided to sell Clementine to a wealthy man who was looking for a girl to live with him, take care of the house and such...

Elizabeth had raised Clementine to be vigilant and never to really trust anyone. Clementine knew what the man’s intentions were and when she arrived at his impressive house outside of Blackwater. He wasn’t all that old, perhaps thirty or so but his parents had died and left him the property and a lot of money. 

Clementine was to cook and clean for him. She felt uncomfortable in his presence, his eyes lingered too long on her and he would make excuses to touch her on the shoulder or small of the back.

It didn’t take long for him to call her to his study. He asked her to sit in his lap and although she didn’t want to, although she knew she shouldn’t, before she knew it, he was pulling her towards him and sitting her down on him.

He made advances on her, telling her that she was pretty and mature for her age and he could make her a woman, hands roaming her body while a prickly wave of sickness crashed over her. 

She felt his horrible, hot lips on her neck. As he did this, Clementine seemed to go into autopilot. She saw a glint of sliver on his desk, a letter opener. Before she could think, she had grabbed it and stabbed him in the neck, driving the blade to the hilt. She watched him clutch uselessly at his throat as he gasped for air. When he stopped breathing, Clementine looted the house of everything she could sell and left for Saint Denis, the place her mother hated so much.

She thought she would feel something by killing him: fear, excitement or disgust? She felt nothing. 

****

Clementine hoped to find herself in Saint Denis but all she found was crowded streets and people who didn’t care, especially for someone who looked like her; her curly red hair was enough at first glance for people to mistake her for white but her small mono-lidded eyes, tanned skin and flat nose gave her away as impure.

Too white for other Chinese people but too Chinese for white people - Clementine has never been  accepted anywhere.

She eventually fell in with a group of street kids who initially tried to pickpocket her but she had fought them off with relative ease, leaving one with a broken nose and a bruised ego. For some reason, they took a shine to her and taught her how to pickpocket, where to run and hide from the law and most importantly, how to make friends. 

She became close with an Irish boy named Oliver who joined the gang not too long before her. Clementine didn’t know love but knew that when she was with him, the world made sense and the anger that seethed inside of her settled. She was… happy, just like she’d been with her mother.

Oliver was a year older than her and a good hear or two taller. Lanky with a gap between his two front teeth and freckles across his nose. He probably cared more for Clementine than Clementine cared for him and he would be the first to admit that but that was ok. It was the innocent kind of love that only young teens were capable of having. 

Oliver flushed redder than the paint of a pillar box when Clementine allowed him to hold her hand as they walked the streets together. 

Oliver stole clothes and jewellery for her but Clementine has never cared about her appearance or expensive gifts. She liked having someone to talk before she went to sleep at night and she liked knowing that he would be there again in the morning. She found that sharing things was nice. She wanted to share everything with Oliver. 

The small amount of money she had went towards her horse, a gorgeous chestnut red Turkoman who she had spent months and months saving for and when she produced the right amount of notes at the stable, the stablemaster had all but fallen over in surprise. The horse was her most loyal friend. Clementine loved animals and often fed the stray cats and dogs of Saint Denis, much to the disdain of others. Clementine felt calm amongst the animals, almost as if they understood her better than any human ever could. Maybe one day, her and Oliver would own a farm or stables together. 

Clementine stayed with the gang until she was seventeen. 

Oliver hadn’t been seen for a few days, which wasn’t unusual if he had found work somewhere so Clementine didn’t worry too much. Oliver knew how to take care of himself; he was able to think on his feet and he was able to talk himself out of almost any situation. One afternoon when Clementine was wandering aimlessly through the overcrowded streets, she noticed a gathering at the park. As she edged closer to see what was happening, she saw that there was another public hanging.

Although Clementine had killed before, public hangings made her sick - to think that people came out to watch someone die was horrific. 

Her blood ran cold, however, as she recognised one of the men standing on the gallows, that befreckled skinny boy. Oliver. He’d been caught rustling cattle. She did her best to fight through the crowd towards him, pushing people out of her way and despite her strength, she was still small of stature and couldn’t reach the front.

She heard the door open, heard the rope unravel and heard Oliver choke out his last few breaths. When she reached the front, she saw that while his body was limp, his eyes were still open. She wondered if he had seen her.

****

In 1898, Clementine Quinn is now 25.  She left Saint Denis soon after Oliver was hung and now she travels from place to place, trying to make sense of the world.  She met a beautiful woman named Madam Nazar who buys trinkets and interesting objects that Clementine acquires on her journeys. She recently started helping an older woman named Maggie Fike with a moonshine business - it’s dangerous work with revenue agents at every corner but Clementine doesn’t mind. 

She hates this country; the country that looks on while others suffer or condemns people for the colour of their skin. Maybe one day she’ll leave and start  again somewhere new.

Since leaving Saint Denis, she’s been a loner and a wanderer. She’s found that other people can’t be trusted and will almost always use you in the end. And getting close to people only complicates things... She always leaves before it gets to that point. Maybe that makes her selfish but she doesn’t care. The world has never shown her any mercy so why should she show mercy to the world?

[theelliottsmiths]

Could you please liveblog the making of Amerika?

Yes

I'm anticipating complaining about the penis zip guy already

Did you know that for a long time as a child I thought the English version was the real version? Cause I did

The bit where they're putting the paint on their faces is weirdly cute even though Richard looks kind of silly

Flake grow out your long hair pleaseee just like. A cute little bob again. I would listen to him talk for hours honestly I like the way he pronounced the words and his tone language doesn't matter

You can always tell by how he holds his face vs his eyes when he's joking "that's what this song is for: to sneak ourselves into their hearts" i feel like they have done that pretty well. For some reason it seems like most of the American fans are from the Midwest but maybe that's just coincidence

Rammstein saying they have no message except "Fleisch, Fleisch" or "ja" or "ich will" I forgot this entire thing is ceaseless dunking and sarcasm

i like the sounds he makes like the. There's a name for them what is it. The noises you make between words for emphasis etc? Those

"America was so fucking annoying we felt the need to call them out on it"

Oli talks a little like he's trying not to yawn. Them saying the war was on while they were in the practice room is strange considering how long the various wars had been going on just from like a born in the late 90s living in 2020 perspective

Ah yes you really were. So subtle. It's very. Clever many double meanings

"sehr gut, Till". :).

The sehnsucht thing tickles me so much he starts off by saying yes it's better to leave things up for interpretation and naturally my brain assumes he means the well thought out probably not true but poetic stuff, right, and then he goes on to say Americans thought sehnsucht was chainsaw and I cannot

The knife also is good.

In a way Amerika as a video is a precursor Ausländer and I like seeing how it compares because its

AS I WAS TYPING THAT OLI SAID THE WORD AUSLÄNDER

Oli does not seem happy to have his words captured At All

I wonder how many people did the Deutschland thing and went straight to saying it's racist without thinking through the reasons behind what they were doing (at least in part criticising American racism) I'm pretty sure l've seen someone complain about it somewhere like it was serious, I think on Reddit around the time the Ausländer Making of came out? Which is why I bring it up

"we wanted to make it clear that it wasn't a love song so these lyrics are perfect" Till: literally just saying this is not a love song

I would like to see them perform a cheer in proper cheerleader costumes instead of the uncomfy stickman Deutschland dance that makes me cringe my skeleton right out of my skin in 2021 please

The juxtaposition of Richards pro-america comments and flakes sarky comments about how nice the urinals are is so reminiscent of that post that's like America where freedom is the choice between thirty kinds of bread that you can't afford to buy

I was going to make a Regan's grave joke but I do prefer to keep that one for Margaret Thatchers grave

I like schneiders hair at this length

Schneiders capacity to oscillate so wildly between being a vacant dumbass and saying intelligent and thought out things is ceaselessly amazing

Saying it's hard because "it's like a punk concert for them" Jörn my guy my dude almost all of them were in punk bands I just checked and this was 2004 Feeling b only broke up in the 90s do you literally just mean Oli (I do not remember if there was any punk going on in the Inchtabokatables) or

Schneider is making it look so easy was he truly just so -_- about feeling b that he can be completely calm in the face drumming that fast? Cause we know usually his fast drumming involves screaming faces and or actual screaming I swear he does and it's just not hearable under the music sidenote he sings along sometimes and if he does it out loud I NEED to hear it

Richard when it's slowed down looks uh. Looks like he's eh. Hm. Is that the real reason people are so into guitarists?

I don't know which part of the sentence Glasses Paul says in that louder voice (schossen? Is he saying that/shot?) but I do like it if I knew more German I would take on way more Rammstein things as echoes you have no idea how much time I spend saying es reicht wenn hier so 'nen fleischfarbenen Draht lang legst which If that's wrong it's exactly what I was told he said so please correct it but it's not my fault unless you consider it my fault for not knowing enough German in which case it is my fault

But anyway yes hes Talking like its a museum tour and in his little glasses and shirt and everything he is totally playing the part of unhinged historian which is the best kind of historian honestly if you're going to be academic in nature you might as well be fucking mental

I want to know what vibes his speech gives off in German because to me he in English and German seems very theatrical in the way he talks? Including how much he rolls his rs it's very... Showy? But maybe not actually?

I forget how many videos Jörn has shot with them honestly

What do you do with this ash sand once your finished with? Some of them had kids I'd have taken it home and pretended it was real moon dust or something

They really go for it when they decide to do something like this and it really is admirable. It's rare they'll half-ass something and even when if feels like their director has they don't themselves

Richard looks very handsome in his space suit before they hang him up

Pretti

He looks like a marionette now nevermind

THIS FUCKER

I just. Do. Not. Enjoy this man I'm sorry to you and the mullet man I'm sure he's great but for fucks SAKE man he

TILL LITERALLY SAYS DONALD SUTHERLAND POINTS TO HIS DICK AND MIMES ZIPPING YOU KNOW WHAT HE'S FUCKING TALKING ABOUT SO WHY DO YOU LOOK SO CONFUSED

YOU TOLD HIM THE STORY YOU KNOW WHY HES SAYING DONALD SUTHERLAND AND POINTING TO HIS PENIS WHY ARE YOU SO GORMLESS

Look. I have nothing against Americans individually B is American Nick is American i love them dearly i know also other Americans a lot of you guys are Americans and I love you lots but here's the thing why are Americans like this

If it's not in English the brain turns off even if the context is obvious it's like when English people see Welsh/English signs and are so anti-welsh that they don't acknowledge that they're also in English and get angry that they don't know where they are

The sweetest little face though!

Softest boy ever besides Rosenrot Till

Till gets bored of the guy and decides to tell a story about a dick it's very him

This is the hair I think of when I think of Till this is the quintessential till haircut no?

God I do dislike this man

Tills voice is so so high here I adore him so completely it's so soft and high and the song is Not

If you're trying to learn how to say L sounds like a German I feel like richard is the easiest one to copy? Unless they're all weirdos and no other German says L sounds like that. Him and flake.

Flakes smile is more cheerful than Paul's there I said it

I know it's not foreshadowing but Jörn foreshadowing Ausländer

Richard talking about America's tendancy to exaggerate is really interesting since that's something the community as a whole seems to agree is a personality trait of his. They didn't fight, they almost broke up. He hates touring and yet he loves touring. Is that why he likes it there or is living there why he's like that?

Can you casually buy ten litres of orange juice? The boys are busy they cannot confirm and Google does not understand what I'm asking

Yeah Richard and Till, get closer

Knife

Schneiders handprint

I forgot about "there was a rumour in the DDR that America didn't exist" what is it with Germany and conspiracies about places not existing I'm there are tears in my eyes I genuinely I never watch this one flake is so fucking funny

Till talking pictures of the others

It's better than I give it credit for in my memory is there anything they've made that is in not a single way entertaining? I feel like no

Thank you for asking for this one it was every fun actually

[croc-odette]

i love ds9 and here are some episode premises that i wish had happened

DND EPISODE: already talked about this but a dungeons and dragons holosuite episode. jake is the overly prepared DM obviously, nog, ziyal, and alexander are players. nog’s player is clearly his idea of sisko, a lawful good paladin; ziyal plays as a cardassian rogue (played by dukat, but clearly based in personality on kira); alexander plays a mage who is kind-of worf kind-of jadzia and keeps switching between them through the game). there’s an NPC version that’s clearly also based on sisko at one point, but from jake’s point of view knowing him as his dad to compare how differently jake and nog, a cadet, see him.

as the game progresses, it becomes clear that the Big Bad is based on a combo of dukat/winn (corrupt government/religious figure). ziyal struggles with the classic DND question of ‘just because i would do this, does that mean my character would?’ except she’s realizing that her dad wouldn’t do any of the selfless things she wants her character to do. alexander keeps trying to solve shit through weird cantrips or puzzle solving instead of fighting and jake is like ‘it’s not deep it’s just a cave bat please roll initiative’. bashir and garak show up as like, the old couple from the princess bride and everyone has to be like ‘jake they’re not dating in real life this rpf shit is kind of inappropriate’ and he’s like ‘wait what? i thought they were dating’. miles is an NPC and dies. nog thinks jake’s-sisko-npc is too silly and disrespectful and jake is like ‘he’s MY dad’ and they have to take a break to argue about it and jake is like ‘your dad is cool too’. nog’s character changes to lawful good paladin rom. actually this whole game is ‘arguing about dads’ time now that i think about it, which jake is not really equipped to jump in on since he has a normal cool dad who he basically just thinks is embarrassing because he’s the ~messiah~ or some goofy bullshit. ends with them calling it a day after the final boss battle and then jake and nog privately talking about whether or not they can trust ziyal if she has to choose between ds9 and dukat, which was an ulterior motive of the game. ziyal is clearly clearly rattled by what the game made her realize and goes to see kira, who she doesn’t tell about the game but who still gives her a hug, and ziyal realizes that kira’s her hero (and like, her mom). alexander tells worf and dax about the game and dax thinks it sounds fun as hell and asks alexander if they can come next time, and worf is like ‘....... only if i can be a blood mage’. nog and jake go home and tell their dads they love them. 

shit i blacked out

PRANK WAR EPISODE: escalating series of pranks starting with jadzia putting hair dye in bashir’s shampoo and ending with the space station accidentally going into a meltdown self destruct scenario. garak is torn between helping jadzia and quark, who are clearly the better pranksters, or helping julian and odo, who suck at pranks but are his lunch friends. everyone has to tell garak that he’s way too intense about ‘pranks’ which are actually just really dangerous booby traps he puts in people’s quarters. sisko ends the episode by grounding everyone; no holosuites for a month!! yes even dax

GREAT RACE EPISODE: there’s some kind of macguffin resource on a planet (a klingon escape pod with a survivor with crucial intelligence information?), but they can’t teleport directly to it. a vorta and jem h’dar team and a ds9 team beam down on opposite sides of its location and are both racing to get there first, having to macgyver together vehicles and tools on the way. lots of excellent outdoor on-location settings and comparison of the jem h’dar/vorta dynamic and the ds9 federation dynamic. ends with the jem h’dar almost winning but turning on the vorta at the last few yards, and sisko’s team beams out as the jem h’dar chant victory. no i refuse to think this is same plot as ‘the ship’ or whatever

KASIDY EPISODE: set earlier in kasidy/sisko’s relationship, kasidy agrees to go with jadzia as a third-party observer to negotiations with a nearby bajoran colony over a trade agreement with the federation. jadzia and kasidy bond over gossiping about sisko on the way, but once they get there kasidy disagrees with the starfleet’s contract during negotiations which causes tensions, and recommends that the bajorans reject it. she and jadzia get into an argument about starfleet and its ideals, and why kasidy chose to be an independent captain rather than a starfleet captain, and how that doesn’t make her lesser than starfleet captains. jadzia realizes that kasidy is right and petitions superiors for a new contract, which kasidy approves of. they go home tenser then when they left, but when sisko asks jadzia what she thinks of kasidy, she very seriously says that she has incredible compassion, intelligence, and integrity, and that she doesn’t need or want jadzia’s approval. but has it anyway

MUSICAL EPISODE: someone already outlined a great musical ep where lwaxana comes in with a betazoid cold and it makes everyone burst into song in another text post and like 100% cosigned

SHAKESPEARE EP: holosuite shenanigans; every character is suddenly stuck as someone from a different shakespeare play. garak is an enthusiastically combative beatrice, kira is cordelia, worf is hamlet, jadzia is a very amused katerina, julian is puck, miles is duncan (”i get MURDERED?”), odo is benvolio and kind of bummed he’s not romeo, etc. i actually don’t know any shakespeare play that well but i think it could be neat. julian is the only fucking person on ds9 who actually knows any of it well enough to figure out what’s going on, except for sisko who doesn’t really care for shakespeare but generally knows about the plays (maybe a good opportunity to talk about the racism in most ‘classic Earth’ pop culture that star trek tends to uphold without criticism). i don’t know shit about the 40 plays that shakespeare wrote about british kings but i could see sisko ending up in that kind of intense role and refusing to play into it, as do the rest of the characters who refuse to fulfill their respective roles and instead find another way to end the program.

KLINGON OPERA EPISODE: goodddddddd can we see some klingon opera, mac. i’ve been dying to see some klingon opera. premise is they believe that someone is assassinating ambassadors and so they tag along with a andorian ambassador who loves opera to see if they can figure out who the assassin is, however the andorian plays it down as over-worrying and that they should use it as an excuse to enjoy themselves. worf and jadzia go and have a lovey dovey time, sisko and kasidy go and have a lovey dovey time watching worf and jadzia get super into the opera together. julian is asked to go in case there’s poison used or first aid needed, and miles is like ‘the last time i went undercover i came home with trauma and someone’s cat so no thanks i hate klingon opera’ and after some increasingly overt passive aggressive implications that julian should take HIM, julian asks garak to go with him. bonus points if for some reason they are wearing the stupid tuxedos from doctor bashir i presume. a lot of loud arguing about the opera which almost gets them kicked out. at the end of the first act, one of the actors DOES try to kill the andorian but jadzia jumps in front of the phaser beam (cue worf being very concerned and annoyed that she could have gotten killed, jadzia being very smug and pleased with herself, her head in his lap, in a pose mirroring an earlier couple in the opera). julian feels like he would have noticed if he hadn’t been distracted by garak, and when it turns out the andorian ambassador has sensitive info about cardassia’s civilian government, julian accuses garak of intentionally trying to distract him to make sure the andorian actually died, which turns into a huge argument (ideally in a very opulent klingon opera house bathroom). during the argument, julian realizes that garak was trying to hint to him that something about the assassination attempt was off; he pieces together aloud that the andorian and the actor must have been in league together, to fake the andorian’s assassination so they could not be tried for profiteering by illegally selling weapons to the cardassian central control during bajoran occupation, which they are currently under investigation for. the other ambassador assasinations were planned by the andorian to cover their tracks. the andorian is arrested, as is the actor. at the ballroom afterparty, sisko and kasidy, in a good mood that everything worked out, agree to join in on traditional klingon dancing. worf and jadzia take a peaceful walk through the gardens and worf recites some really lovely klingon poetry about how sometimes it’s NOT a good day to die if someone loves you, that none of us fucking understand without looking it up. julian and garak talk on the balcony, and julian posits that garak is loyal to cardassia, but which part of it? garak answers, very close and meaningfully looking at julian, ‘like most things... it’s complicated.’

i was about to say ‘fake wedding episode’ but literally LITERALLY that was the shotgun wedding lwaxana/odo ep. i love star trek

KEIKO BOTANIST EPISODE: kira accompanies keiko to bajor to help find a medicinal plant that was thought to be wiped out during the occupation but might still exist in a remote mountain region based on local reports. a nice episode where we learn more about bajor and see how bajorans are coping and healing. over a campfire, kira thanks keiko for accepting her into their family. keiko tells kira that she was really intimidated by her when they first met, and then realized she’s one of the most loving people she knows. just a nice episode, maybe some mild nature survival conflict, but ends on a hopeful note of them finding the plant. miles beams down with the kids to have a picnic with keiko and kira, and kira’s happy to see children playing carelessly on bajor again.

JAKE AND ZIYAL EPISODE: everyone thinks jake and ziyal are dating because they’ve been hanging out. julian’s an idiot and mentions to sisko ‘must be hard, huh’ and sisko’s like ‘WHAT must be hard’ and julian’s like oh my god were we not supposed to talk to him about this. jake and ziyal aren’t dating but as soon as sisko tries to talk to jake about it jake is like ‘i’m not but actually maybe i SHOULD ask her out’ and sisko is like fuck. okay no that’s fine. this is more of a B-plot but basically give jake and ziyal age-appropriate love interests they’re both RIGHT there

[kcatta-wodahs]

Hey there :3 May I request a matchup🙈? I'm a 5'6 tall, queer, chin long dyed red haired girl(she/her) and you can call me Karo if you need a name :p I don't really care if it's a single pairing or a poly one as well as the kind of relationship (platonic/romantic/sexual), but maybe a romantic one would be sweet🤔 I'm a INFP and was born under the sign of Pisces and I think the stereotype fits me pretty well lol. I don't think I would describe myself as clingy, I definetely need my space (part1)

and me-time, but sometimes it's also nice to have someone who will drag me outside to do stuff or socialize if I'm isolating myself too much or another depressive episode seems to creep up on me. I think they need to understand, doesn't matter if it's a platonic or romantic relationship, that sometimes I can't give them much(time etc) and that that's nothing personal and that they're still very important to me. Hmmm I think I would prefer my relationship like I like my fanfics hehe, slow burning, like first get to know each other, (enemies to) friends to lovers is just *chefs kiss* for me <3 I really love to draw and sing, to dance too, I like to spend time in nature and with animals, help them too. But I also like adrenaline rushes, like rollercoasters, cave exploring, bungee jumping, exploring lost places etc, I would say I'm almost up to anything if it's exciting or interesting, but I definetely like just chilling and watching netflix, playing games or watching Vine compilations or crackhead satire twilight tiktoks(which is tbh the things I do most of the time until someone drags me out). I love making others laugh with just random outbursts(thats pretty much my humour, just randomness and gen z memes). I try not to judge anyone for anything and be open for all kinds of stuff, except for like non-negotiable things for me like racism, homophobia, sexism etc, like, full offense but I have absolutely a zero tolerance for that. I also get very emotional very easily, doesn't matter if it's something not so important like a touching movie scene(so many things make me cry so easily haha) or like in an argument. I really have a hard time argueing, I hate it SO much, I either try to avoid conflict(and run away like a coward lol) or if it's really something we have to discuss I sometimes need time and space in between(not the best under stress talker/thinker), but if the other side is being calm and considerate then I think I would be fine too Oh almost forgot,I love cuddling(definetely also platonic)and am not afraid to just throw myself at my friends/lover/s I am getting better at not caring about what others think, but sometimes I'm still pretty insecure about everything(my actions,my future,my appearence..),but my motto is fake it till you make it,so feck other people,I can do whatever the hell I like and nobody's gonna stop me hehe😈🙈 Soo yes,I think that will be enough😂Thank you for your time and effort👐💕👐

A/N: I promise you fake it til you make it is 100000% good strategy and also i see feck are you from ireland

I pair you with.... The Attic Sandwich!

Beel and Belphie would be perfect partners for you. The two of them balance each other out in many ways, and you fit right into that. They value the connection between them and because of it they don't expect to always be around each other. This connection extends to you. Beel takes you out to all sorts of places (usually ones where there's unique food) and would definitely have fun with some adrenaline rushes. It makes him forget about his hunger for a bit. Belphie is absolutely there for your sense of humor and he's very good at watching your depression and arranging something to cheer you up.

More Below the Cut!

The plot of the first 20 chapters is what really gets you close to these two. (Spoilers for that follow and in the last three bullet points) Beel opens up more and more to you, and just absolutely falls for you. Belphie gives us that sweet, sweet enemies to lovers trope. He becomes curious about you, especially with how smitten Beel is, and ends up falling along the way.

THIS is the cuddliest group to ever cuddle oh my goodness when you want snuggles you will have them

They adore just relaxing with you. The three of you become a pile on the couch while watching movies or other videos.

Beel will watch you scroll through tumblr while he engulfs you with his arms. Belphie somehow worms his way into yours and alternates between sleeping against your chest and watching your screen as well. You hear an occasional snort of laughter from him.

Beel is very emotionally intelligent, so he can quickly determine your mood and what he can do to help.

Belphie encourages you to break out of your shell and be yourself. He's very blunt about his opinion of other people lol

He finds himself staying awake longer with you just so he can hear you. He thinks you're hilarious, honestly, and loves talking with you.

When you throw yourself at Beel he catches you. He big and strong and loves affection from you. but also this happens https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIhl1cW9Me8

Belphie thinks its the funniest shit he can't breathe

If you do it to Belphie honestly he just stands there - either to let you fall or cling to him like a koala. He looks so Done but I promise he loves it. He laughs at you either way. He saves hugs and cuddling for when laying in bed or sitting. Too tired to hold you.

They both understand needing space, and will often just go off and do their own thing. They have complete faith in your feelings for each other, and will never doubt that you love them.

At least not for needing alone time - Belphie has lingering guilt over plot but he tries to make up for it by protecting you.

The others in the house can't help but be reminded of the trio they were with Lilith as angels.

While it still hurts to remember, Beel and Belphie feel almost as if they've come home around you. A part of them that was lost is found again. 

Snippet!

Cleaning day is nobody's favorite, but least of all Belphie's. Too much work. Just don't take ou your stuff and then you don't have to clean it later, right? The problem to him seems to be all the time people spend awake and he shouldn't have to deal with it!

But cleaning day is a little better with Beel and Karo. With their laughs and energy. Usually seeing other people so active drained him, but not with those two. He watched as Karo danced around the room to the music she had put on, while she and Beel tidied up. It was frankly adorable, and best of all: Belphie wasn't expected to join.

He was happy to watch. He watched as Karo spun into Beel's side, surprising him and causing him to stumble before he laughed and swept her up into a spin together. He watched as Beel picked Karo up with ease to put something on the top shelves of the room. He watched Karo find pillows in all the nooks and crannies of the room, and he huffed and whined when she threw each one at him on the bed.

Belphie was on snack duty. In exchange for the two helping him with cleaning day, he was expected to provide the rewards. This was not a small feat when Beel was involved, but it was far better than cleaning.

"Hah! The closet is done!" Karo declared, brandishing her feather duster. "Snack us, Belphie!"

He couldn't help but chuckle. It was an awful phrase. Silly and stupid, but Karo's enthusiasm was just so contagious. 

"Good job. C'mere," he told them, reaching to his hoard of treats.

Karo practically jumped onto the bed, grinning at him, while Beel was close behind looking very expectant. Belphie hid the curling smile of his lips by lifting up a large bag. "The closet is the biggest monster of them all - so for defeating it, you two get this."

Karo gasped and Beel's eyes gleamed. "Oh, those are my favorite..." he said, already reaching out.

"Ah-ah," Belphie pulled the bag back, to be met with a pout from Beel. "You'll eat them too fast for Karo to get any, so we're gonna do something different."

"Different?" Karo asked. 

Belphie smirked and opened the bag, which led to a very audible tummy rumble from Beel. He and Karo couldn't help but laugh. He pulled out a snack - just one - and held it up. "Karo, say 'aaah'." 

She beamed at him and opened her mouth. "Aaah!" Belphie tried really hard to keep his blush down as he dropped the snack in her mouth. She was so darn cute about everything. 

"Now you give one to Beel."

"Just one?" 

"Just one," Belphie agreed, smirking at the pout.

It didn't last long though, as Karo held up the snack and said "aaah" to Beel. He eagerly opened his mouth for the treat, but shocked himself by blushing heavily once she leaned over to feed him. Karo didn't comment, but seemd to be rather proud of the fact.

Belphie fed her another, and she followed up with Beel - but Beel took her hand after stealing the snack from her fingertips. He couldn't help but kiss the palm of her hand. "You're... so cute," he mumbled. "I like this."

"I thought you would," Belphie said, pleased with himself. "Karo?" he held up another. 

She went for the treat, but instead he pulled it away, holding it above his head. "Beel gave you a kiss, don't I get one too?"

Karo paused and blinked before laughing and leaning in. "You're adding new rules," she told him. 

"Never said I couldn't," he answered, giving her a light peck on the lips before presenting her with the treat. The look of satisfaction in her eyes made his heart pound, and he could tell that Beel's was just as busy.

"My turn," Beel said quickly. Whether he meant for a snack or for a kiss... well. We shall see.

[johnrossbowie]

LEAVING TWITTER

I wrote this earlier in the fall, before the election, after dissolving my Twitter account. I wasn’t sure where to put it (“try up your ass!” – someone, I’m sure) and then I remembered I have a tumblr I never use. Anyway, here tis.

How do you shame someone who thinks Trumps’ half-baked policies and quarter-baked messaging put him in the pantheon of great Presidents? How do you shame someone so lacking in introspection that they will call Obama arrogant while praising Trump’s decisiveness and yet at the same time vehemently deny that they’re racist? How do you shame someone for whom that racism is endearing and maybe long overdue?

You don’t. It’s silly to think otherwise.

Twitter is an addiction of mine, and true to form, my dependence on it grew more serious after I quit drinking in 2010. At first it was a chance to mouth off, make jokes both stupid and erudite and occasionally stick my foot in my mouth (I owe New Yorker writer Tad Friend an apology. He knows why, or (God willing) he’s forgotten. Either way. Sorry.) I blew off steam, steam that was accumulating without booze to dampen the flames. Not always constructive venting, but I also met new friends, and connected with people whose work I’ve admired for literal decades and ended up seeing plays with Lin-Manuel Miranda and hanging backstage with Jane Wiedlin after a Go-Go’s show and exchanging sober thoughts with Mike Doughty. When my mom passed in 2018, a lot of people reached out to tell me they were thinking of me. This was nice. For a while, Twitter was a huge help when I needed it.

I used to hate going to parties and really hated dancing and mingling, but a couple of drinks would fix that. Point is, for a while, booze was a huge help, too.

But my engagement with Twitter changed, and I started calling people my ‘friends’ even though I’d never once met them or even heard their voices. These weren’t even penpals, these were people whose jokes or stances I enjoyed, so with Arthurian benevolence I clicked on a little heart icon, liked their tweet, and assumed therefore that we had signed some sort of blood oath.

We had not. I got glib, and cheap, and a little lazy. And then to make matters much worse, Trump came along and extended his reach with the medium.

There was a while there where I thought I could be a sort of voice for the voiceless, and I thought I was doing that. I tried very hard to only contribute things that I felt were not being said – It wasn’t accomplishing anything to notice “Haha Trump looks like he’s bullshitting his way through an oral report” – such things were self-evident. I tried to point out very specific inconsistencies in his policies, like the Muslim ban meant to curb terrorism that still favored the country that brought forth 13 of the 9/11 hijackers. Like his full-throated cries against media bias performed while he suckled at Roger Ailes’ wrinkly teat.  Like his fondness for evangelical votes that coincided with a scriptural knowledge that lagged far behind mine, even though I’m a lapsed Episcopalian, and there is no one less religiously observant than a lapsed Episcopalian. But that eventually gave way to unleashing ad hominem attacks against his higher profile supporters, who I felt weren’t being questioned enough, who I felt were in turn being fawned over by theirdim supporters. If you’re one of these guys, and you think I’m talking about you, you’re probably right, but don’t mistake this for an apology. You suck, and you support someone who sucks, and your idolatry is hurting our country and its standing in the world. Fuck you entirely, but that’s not the point. The point is that me screaming into the toilet of Twitter helps no one – it doesn’t help a family stuck at the border because they’re trying to secure a better life for their kids. It doesn’t help a poor teenager who can’t get an abortion because the party of ‘small government’ has squeezed their tiny jurisdiction into her uterus. It doesn’t help the coal miner who’s staking all his hopes on a dying industry and a President’s empty promises to resurrect it. I was born in New York City, and I currently live in Los Angeles. Those are the only two places I’ve ever lived, if you don’t count the 4 years I spent in Ithaca[1]. So, yes, I live in a liberal bubble, and while I’ve driven across the country a couple of times and did a few weeks in a touring band and am as crushed as any heartlander about the demise of Waffle House, you have me dead to rights if you call me a coastal elitist. And with that in mind, I offer few surprises. A guy who grew up in the theater district and was vehemently opposed to same-sex marriage or felt you should own an AR-15? THAT would be newsworthy. I am not newsworthy. I can preach to the choir, I can confirm people’s biases, but I will likely not sway anyone who is eager to dismiss a Native New Yorker who lives in Hollywood. I grew up in the New York of the 1970s, and that part of my identity did shape my politics. My mom’s boss was gay and the Son of Sam posed a realistic threat. As such, gays are job creators[2] and guns are used for homicide much more often than they are used for self-defense[3]. I have found this to be generally true over the years, and there’s even data to back it up.

“But Mr. Bowie,” you might say, though I insist you call me John - “those studies are conducted by elitist institutions and those institutions suck!” And again, I am not going to reason with people who will dismiss anything that doesn’t fit their limited world view as elitist or, God Help Us, fake news. But the studies above are peer-reviewed, convincing, and there are more where those came from.

“But John,” you might say, and I am soothed that we’re one a first name basis - “Can’t you just stay on Twitter for the jokes?” Ugh. A) apparently not and B) the jokes are few and far between, and I am 100% part of that problem.

I have stuff to offer, but Twitter is not the place from which to offer it.

After years of academically understanding that Twitter is not the real world, Super Tuesday 2020 made the abstract pretty fucking concrete. If you had looked at my feed on the Monday beforehand – my feed which is admittedly curated towards the left, but not monolithic (Hi, Rich Lowry!) – you’d have felt that a solid Bernie surge was imminent, but also that your candidate was going surprise her more vocal critics. When the Biden sweep swept, when Bernie was diminished and when Warren was defeated, I realized that Twitter is not only not the real world, it’s almost some sort of Phillip K. Dickian alternate timeline, untethered to anything we’re actually experiencing in our day to day life. This is both good news and bad news – one, we’re not heading towards a utopia of single payer health care and the eradication of American medical debt any time soon, but two, we’re also not being increasingly governed by diaper-clad jungen like Charlie Kirk. Clouds and their linings. Leaving Twitter may look like ceding ground to the assclowns but get this – the ground. Is not. There.

It’s just air.

There are tangible things I can do with my time - volunteer with a local organization called Food On Foot, who provide food and job training for people experiencing homelessness here in my adopted Los Angeles. I can give money to candidates and causes I support, and I can occasionally even drop by social media to boost a project or an issue and then vanish, like a sort of Caucasian Zorro who doesn’t read his mentions. I can also model good behavior for my kids (ages 10 and 13) who don’t need to see their father glued to his phone, arguing about Trumps incompetence with Constitutional scholars who have a misspelled Bible verse in their bio (three s’ in Ecclesiastes, folks).

So farewell Twitter. I’ll miss a lot of you. Perhaps not as badly as I miss Simon Maloy and Roger Ebert and Harris Wittels and others whose deaths created an unfillable void on the platform. But I won’t miss the yelling, and the lionization of poor grammar, and anonymous trolls telling my Jewish friends that they were gonna leave the country “via chimney.” I will not miss people who think Trump is a stable genius calling me a “fucktard.” I will not miss transphobia or cancelling but I will miss hashtag games, particularly my stellar work during #mypunkmusical (Probably should have quit after that surge, I was on fire that night, real blaze of glory stuff I mean, Christ, Sunday in the Park with the Germs? Husker Du I Hear A Waltz? Fiddler on the Roof (keeping an eye out for the cops)? These are Pulitzer contenders.). Twitter makes me feel lousy, even when I’m right, and I’m often right. There’s just no point in barking bumperstickers at each other, and there are people who are speaking truth to power and doing a cleaner job of it – Aaron Rupar, Steven Pasquale, Louise Mensch, Imani Gandy and Ijeoma Oluo to name five solid mostly politically based accounts (Yes, Pasquale is a Broadway tenor. He’s also a tenacious lefty with good points and research and a dreamy voice. You think you’re straight and then you hear him sing anything from Bridges of Madison County and you want him to spoon you.). You’re probably already following those mentioned, but on the off chance you’re not, get to it. You’ll thank me, but you won’t be able to unless you actually have my email.

_______

[1] And Jesus, that’s worse – Ithaca is such a lefty enclave that they had an actual socialist mayor FOR WHOM I VOTED while I was there. And not socialist the way some people think all Democrats are socialist – I mean Ben Nichols actually ran on the socialist ticket and was re-elected twice for a total of six years.

[2] The National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce, “America’s LGBT Economy” Jan 20th, 2017

[3] The Violence Policy Institute, Firearm Justifiable Homicides and Non-Fatal Self Defense Gun Use, July 2019.

[calacuspr]

Calacus Weekly Hit & Miss – Arsenal's racism stance & Dulux

Every Monday we look at the best and worst communicators in the sports world from the previous week.

HIT – ARSENAL

A lot has been said about sportspeople taking the knee before matches to highlight racial inequality and fight discrimination. 

Back in June, we wrote about the importance of sports stars and brands doing more in the fight against social injustice, but the value of taking the knee continues to divide opinion.

The Professional Footballers’ Association, the trade union for players in England and Wales, said in December that players were “overwhelmingly in support” of continuing to take a knee after its members were consulted. 

However, a number of leading players including Crystal Palace’s Wilfried Zaha have stopped taking a knee because they feel the protest is no longer enough. 

Zaha commented that he believes the act is “degrading”, while Brentford striker Ivan Toney said: “We are being used as puppets.”

Last month, Rangers midfielder Glen Kamara was racially abused by Slavia Prague’s Ondrej Kudela in the Europa League, with the Czech defender later handed a 10-game ban by UEFA. 

Czech minister Vratislav Mynar then criticised UEFA and wrote an open letter to UEFA's control, ethics and disciplinary body, he wrote: “You have decided on a completely unprecedented punishment for a player who did not harm anyone and only verbally - according to his statement - offended his opponent. You condemn a decent person without a single piece of evidence.

“In your submission, the fight against racism has become the fight of the unsuccessful against the successful, the pinnacle of hypocrisy, positive discrimination, and embarrassing pandering to stupid trends.

“We will not kneel before you and no threats apply to the Czech football fan.” 

While the football world deplored the actions of Kudela, the Czech champions made the decision not to kneel before both legs of their quarter-final tie against Arsenal, a club where Kamara spent five years between 2012-2017.

Arsenal’s response was a powerful one led by their captain Alexandre Lacazette, who took a knee directly in front of the watching Slavia Prague players.

Poetically, all four goals scored by the visitors in their convincing 4-0 win were netted by black players, with Nicolas Pepe and Bukayo Saka adding to Lacazette’s brace.

Mikel Arteta revealed that a group of senior players asked him whether they could take a knee prior to the game, with the club and Uefa giving the green light to make the gesture that held added significance on the night.

“They asked me and the club that they wanted to take that initiative,” Arteta said. “They had the right reasons for it, so the club was very supportive. I think it was a good gesture.

“We spoke with the club to make sure we could follow the rules of Uefa and we can do it in the right way. We decided to take that approach, which I really like from the players, and I must say Uefa was very supportive as well. The captains came to me and asked me to do that, and I just supported them like the club did.”

The Arsenal players deserve a great deal of credit for reacting in the way that they did while at the same time letting their football do the talking on the pitch.

Footballers are often accused of lacking self-awareness but coming together to discuss the issue prior to the game showed an understanding of the gravity of the situation and the players were rightly lauded for their efforts.

MISS – DULUX SOCIAL MEDIA GOES ROGUE

Sports sponsorship is big business with Premier League clubs providing profile and potentially a return on the investment made by their partners.

Football clubs are now getting smart to the opportunities to diversify.

Gone are the days when a shirt sponsor was the only commercial partner.

Clubs now have commercial partners for every conceivable category and even multiple partners aligned to different specific target territories.

While it may have seemed random in years gone by, Tottenham Hotspur announcing a partnership with Dulux, the global paint brand, would appear in the face of it to be just another sports sponsorship agreement.

Tottenham made an announcement on their website about the deal and the simple PR stunt of using “the world-famous Dulux dog” by giving him a tour of the stadium and training centre.

Nuno Pena, AkzoNobel Marketing Director for UK & Ireland, said: “Our relationship with Tottenham Hotspur is a perfect synergy of two iconic British brands.

“Together, we are joined by a shared passion for colour. Spurs fans will know only too well the powerful impact putting on their white and blue scarves and shirts has on a matchday, and as a business we’re committed to using colour to transform lives.

“We know it’s the small details that make the difference and give you the competitive edge – in sport and in decorating – and we’re looking forward to expanding on our firm foundations to explore this power of colour together, in both the stadium and in people’s homes, in the years to come.”

So far, so good.

But when it came to social media (yes that ongoing hive of scum and villainy (if you know, you know)) it was an entirely different matter.

One Twitter user responded: “Can the dog play centre back?”

Perhaps trying to create a humorous tone, the official Dulux response was: “He might do a better job Chris 😆.”

Another reply by Dulux showed an empty trophy cabinet, referring to Tottenham’s lack of silverware, having only won one trophy since 1991.

When another pointed out that Tottenham can keep any paint supplies in the cabinet because they “don't seem to put anything else in there,” Dulux replied by saying: “Don't be silly, surfaces should be dust free before painting.”

It appeared as if the Tottenham manager Jose Mourinho had not been briefed about the new partnership with one of the biggest brands in the country.

When asked about the Dulux dog at his pre-Everton press conference, Mourinho replied: “What’s that?”

The tweets caused embarrassment for both the Tottenham and Dulux and underlined the importance of getting the right tone and context when making online jokes.

The Dulux social media team had clearly not been briefed clearly on what would or would not be appropriate content following the announcement with the posts quickly deleted.

The damage had already been done, though, and Dulux were forced into making a hasty statement on Twiitter: “We’re deeply sorry for the posts from Dulux this morning in response to the announcement of our relationship with @SpursOfficial.

“These do not reflect how proud we are to be the Official Paint Supplier of the Club. We’re investigating what happened and apologise to all Spurs fans.”

To their credit, Tottenham responded with a paint-related joke of their own: “We’ll gloss over it this time...”

In the end, the story may be nothing more than a footnote in the grand scheme of Tottenham’s affairs this season, particularly with increased focus on their progress under Mourinho.

But it’s further evidence of the necessity for thorough preparation, robust safeguards and processes

[arlingtonpark]

SNK 131/132 Review

Hello, my name is ArlingtonPark, and I write SNK meta.

I’ve been doing this every month for three years now.

And I’ve never skipped a month.

Nope.

No siree.

Uh-uh.

(My punishment is that I have to write at least 4,000 words on both chapters now.)

So, we’ve come a long way, haven’t we.

In chapter 1, humanity had given up on itself. Humanity had barely survived the titan apocalypse and everyone was just happy to be alive.

Humanity had to crowd into the walls, but it was better than being outside.

It was better than being dead.

They could have everything they’d ever need. Friends, family, children, food, a place to live. All of it was inside the walls.

Everything you’d need to live a fulfilling life, and many saw it that way.

The Survey Corps would explore the outside world, but they were unpopular and no one took outside exploration seriously.

In chapter 1, humanity was willing to settle.

Then in comes our hero, Eren Yeager.

People in the walls had a job, family, friends, and their needs were generally met, but Eren told them they should want even more than that.

That’s how the story began.

If Attack on Titan had ended with the basement reveal, I would have said the series was obviously written by someone who watches too much Fox News.

Attack on Titan, before the basement, was a story about paranoia. It was a story about outsiders threatening to invade and destroy everything our heroes loved.

The heroes in this narrative are the patriotic members of the military. They devote their heart to humanity, are willing to die for their country, and are put upon by their slovenly compatriots.

And in between the outsiders and the patriots are the fence-sitters. These are people like the general public, and some named characters.

They’re not the enemy per se, but they’re mindset is still regarded as wrong-headed by the story.

Specifically because they are not devoted enough to the cause.

The wall’s denizens are able to live lives no worse than they would otherwise, and they’re satisfied with that, yet the story regards that thinking as insular and complacent.

People like Jean, Sasha, and Hannes are shown to be in the wrong throughout the story, and they only come around to the good side when they learn to devote their hearts.

Jean wanted to live safely in the interior, away from the action. He started off bad because he was only fighting for himself; he became good when he started fighting for his country.

Sasha also wasn’t a team player at the start. She hated that people were moving into her area, even though they were refugees looking for a new place to live. She only straightens out when she learns that she’s part of a larger group and the needs of the group are more important than her own.

Hannes was a lazy soldier who shapes up later in the story. He still died, but the point remains: he got gud only when he learned to be a patriot.

All of the bad guys are the ones who don’t fight hard enough.

The series had a lot of Donald Trump energy to it, with so much talk about People Who Look Like Us But Really They’re Different infiltrating society, and a complacent populace that doesn’t respect the military not caring about a vaguely tangible threat.

Worse than that, honestly. Trump just wanted to build a wall to keep the titans out; for a time, Eren was the hero specifically because he wanted to go beyond that wall and kill all the Mexicans.

Things started going in heavy on the satire in the Uprising arc. Unfortunately Isayama is no Jon Swift.

Japan is constitutionally committed to pacifism and formally renounces war as a solution to conflict.

In Attack on Titan, King Fritz forbids the Eldians from defending themselves because he’s a pacifist who renounces war.

You just know Isayama thinks this is hot shit he’s writing.

But wait, it’s worse!

The King Fritz character is a caricature for the conservative’s boogeyman du jure: the woke progressive.

He obsesses over the sins of the past.

He self-flagellates over it.

He talks endlessly about needing to atone, but also that they can never atone for what happened.

He abhors war even with a gun to his head.

He’s Tucker Carlson’s straw man punching bag. The AOC of SNK.

It’s like Trump wrote this.

Dummy-head King Fritz is practically screaming that modern eldians are guilty of genocide! But I know sins of father should not be visited on the son. Covfefe?

It goes from weird to *eww* when the story associates the wokeheads with barbaric, cult-like rituals. They pass down the Founding Titan by having one person ritualistically titanize and devour the other.

……okay.

So.

You could write a biting satire of left-wing politics, it just wouldn’t look like this. Attack on Titan is always at its worst when it tries to be better than it is.

Real life progressives emphasize past atrocities only because they feel those atrocities haven’t been properly acknowledged. And they talk about atonement because, naturally, if they haven’t been acknowledged, proper penance almost certainly hasn’t been given.

Satire works best when you take something and judge it on terms everyone, regardless of political persuasion, can agree on, thus demonstrating its shortcomings.

Everyone generally agrees on whether a stupid thing is stupid, so if you can successfully take the basic tenants of a position and cast them in a silly light, you’ve successfully made a valid point about that position’s failings. And maybe you’ve won some people over to boot.

SNK isn’t going to convince anyone, and I doubt Isayama was aiming for that anyway. It all reads like catnip for the people who already drank the kool-aid.

SNK’s attempt at skewering wokism is to say that with their mindset, the terrorists win. No nuance or exploration, just labeling people who disagree with you lazy, greedy, unpatriotic.

All the invective of Juvenal but actually juvenile.

I think the undercurrent of unironic nationalism peaks in the Uprising Arc, where the greedy elites are overthrown by the military in a populist coup.

It’s a classic nationalist narrative.

Greedy businessmen who don’t truly care about the country are a common boogeyman in right-wing circles.

And of course the military, being a symbol of national strength and sacrifice, is often valorized by right-wingers.

After the basement reveal, though, there’s been a notable shift in perspective.

SNK definitely takes a more critical view of nationalism now.

Turns out Grisha was part of a nationalist gang, and he was so caught up in nationalistic fervor he dehumanized his own son and only saw him as a stepping stone to racial dominance.

The people of Paradis have whipped themselves into a nationalistic frenzy. The people were calling for genocide against the marleyans.

When the government refused to commit to that, the government that had overthrown its predecessor in a nationalist coup was itself overthrown in a nationalist coup.

Don’t forget the last we saw of Paradis before leaving it: people celebrating Eren’s genocide. While the Alliance is giving their lives to save humanity, Paradis is partying like there’s no tomorrow.

SNK has almost become a metacommentary on itself; a story about how nationalist narratives backfire and only lead to more conflict.

I’m still not prepared to say SNK is fully anti-nationalist, though.

This reads to me like Isayama trying to have his cake and eat it. He wants to send a broadly pro-nationalist message while warning of the excesses of his own ideology.

There are good and bad points to be made about this.

It’s great that the series is covering all its bases.

Whatever its faults, SNK is a series that discusses its themes from multiple angles.

When the series talks about freedom, it talks about it in all its permutations.

Negative freedom, as when Eren wants humanity to be able to live beyond the walls.

Positive freedom, as when Historia builds an orphanage so the kids can build better lives for themselves.

Political freedom, as when King Fritz’s regime is toppled and society is liberalized.

Freedom from external forces, as when the Eldians struggle to be free from discrimination.

Freedom from internal inhibitions, as when Historia overcomes her self-doubt and lives for herself.

False freedom, as when the mainland Eldians delude themselves and think freedom comes by serving their Marleyan masters.

I appreciate that Isayama is willing to put in the effort to showcase his themes in all their variations.

…

Ok, so here’s the bad stuff.

I think the series harps on nationalism a lot because it’s part of a larger theme of self-determination.

SNK is, ofc, a series about self-determination. I’ve already talked about how it’s about freedom; freedom necessarily implies self-determination.

But there are two levels to this theme: the individual and the collective.

On the level of individual self-determination, there is Historia and her arc. She was a slave to other people’s expectations, and she chose to disregard those expectations and live for herself.

This theme is repeated again with individual Eldians like Reiner and Gabi, as well as Armin. These are people who’s ability to lead their best lives is limited by various circumstances.

They are unfree.

Reiner and Gabi are Eldians in a Marleyan dominated society. They want to live their lives and build a better life for their friends and family, but they can’t because of racism.

Armin wants to explore the outside world, but can’t because of the titans.

The theme of the story is that people have a right to control their own course, and they very much have a right to defend, even kill, in the name of preserving that right.

However lily-livered our heroes are, it is always drilled into them that they have to kill to enjoy the freedom they want.

I think Isayama harps on nationalism a lot because he believes that individual rights can be safely applied to groups; that groups have a right to self-determination just as much as individuals.

There is an individual level to freedom and there is a collective level.

In chapter 1, it’s not just Eren or Armin who are unfree, it is humanity that is unfree.

The titans took humanity’s land and humanity is entitled to take that land back.

Eren’s dream was for humanity to stand up for itself, not any one human.

That is a seriously flawed way of thinking.

Individuals are fundamentally different from groups of individuals. You can get away with it up to a certain point, but individual rights and group rights don’t always align. That contradiction is something the series has hinted at, but has never fully dealt with.

Historia’s pregnancy is the prime example. She’s a person with rights, but also possibly the key to her people’s survival.

Erwin’s death was also an example. Erwin devoted his heart to humanity and led them well, but when the time came to resurrect him, the choice was made to let him rest in peace. Erwin was a big asset to humanity, but it was decided to leave him be.

SNK seems to believe that when this contradiction arises, individual rights should prevail. That’s good, because most people would argue that.

But to think of group rights in this way, as being an outgrowth of a general right to self-determination, alongside individual rights, is questionable.

The central conflict of the story is over the rights of Eldians, not as individuals, but as a group. Victory for the good guys is framed as a matter of winning Eldian self-determination.

That is a distinctly nationalist framework, and I object to that.  

This is very tricky to write about because it’s natural to think about it in terms of groups.

Eldians as a group are hated, so naturally a solution would be thought of in terms of Eldians as a group.

It’s not wrong per se, but it cannot also be seen outside the light of SNK’s prior nationalist undertones.

I don’t think I’m conveying my thoughts very well, but…it’s just…

People say that SNK completely changed after the basement, but that’s wrong.

SNK is the same series it’s always been at heart.

It is because of this that moralizing about collective self-determination is something that raises eyebrows.

It is almost certainly part and parcel with the series’ prior nationalist urgings.

…

……

(Word count: 2077)

Fuck.

Uh.

Er.

Eren!

Shithead! What are you doing, Yeager?

Eren is a monster.

Literally.

So the truth comes out, and it’s exactly what I expected it would be.

People can disagree about Eren being a nationalist, but no one can deny that he is clearly an avatar for the ideology.

Eren loves his friends. He loves his family. He loves his people.

But just as the archetypical nationalist’s love becomes twisted to justify all sorts of atrocities, so too has Eren’s love become a hellish monstrosity.

Like the archetypical nationalist, Eren can only see the world in zero-sum terms.

“If we lose, we die. If we win, we live. And you can’t win if you don’t fight.”

That is his motto. It’s Paradis or the world. One or the other, but not both. There can be no peace, no coexistence, no compromise.

People have said that Eren has changed, but that’s wrong. This is just the logical conclusion of his exclusionary, nationalist mindset. The mindset he’s had from the very beginning.

Eren describes life behind the walls as undignified. He describes humanity’s comeback as a reclamation of that dignity.

Dignity not in the sense of his personal dignity, but in terms of humanity’s collective dignity.

That is to say he was thinking as a nationalist does even as a kid.

In some contexts, it makes sense to think of humanity as a singular entity. Administrative purposes, for example, or even just to foster a sense of community, but to think of humanity the way Eren does demonstrates a nationalist mindset and all that implies.

For Eren, humanity isn’t just a singular entity, humanity is almost like a living organism. He talks about humanity as an organism that can have indignity visited upon it, as an organism that needs to stand up for itself, that needs to fight.

(By the way, another example of Isayama’s hack writing: the Eldian people are a nation. A group of people bound together by a shared culture and history.

And wouldn’t you know it: the Eldians are bound together by P A T H S, a metaphysical bond through which Eldians can experience the shared history of their race.

This is such hack writing!)

Talking about humanity in this way in this context is very revealing about Eren’s worldview.

In the nationalist’s eyes, the nation is a singular organism whose survival is paramount; the individuals who compose the nation are not as important.

That’s why nationalism tends to lead to so many awful outcomes. The ideology is inherently dehumanizing even for the people the nationalist views as on his side.

But what I like about this depiction is how the series shows the contradictions inherent to that.

Eren may view the survival of humanity, and now Eldians, as paramount, as more important than any one life, even his own, but he’s still a human being who can form connections with others.

I think this is why Eren’s turned on his friends the way he has.

“To fight monsters, we have to abandon our humanity.”

Eren has taken Armin’s words to their logical conclusion: to survive, we have to dehumanize ourselves.

Thus, we end up with Eren pushing his friends away. He knows he has to separate himself from his humanity to be able to do the ghastly things he was planning.

This is the contradiction inherent to nationalism. It takes human emotions and twists it towards inhuman actions.

Not just questionable actions (which aren’t actually questionable, but are framed as such by the story) like Erwin’s strategies, but genuinely inhuman stuff.

SNK may be sympathetic to the ideology, but it’s heartening that the series is willing to be so critical of nationalist excesses.

(Setting aside for a second that nationalism of any degree is in itself arguably excessive.)

With Eren, SNK has taken maxims and morals it previously championed and picked them apart. The series wants us to fight, but now it’s showing us what happens when you fight too hard. The story is almost like a deconstruction of itself.

As far as free will is concerned, I think Eren’s right. He is in fact committing this genocide.

I don’t want Eren to be a puppet to the Attack Titan, or for him to somehow be absolved of this crime he’s committed.

When Eren confronted Reiner in the basement in Liberio, Eren was the one who offered excuses for why Reiner wasn’t to blame for the Grim Reminder. Reiner was the one who shot them down.

I don’t actually think this is correct, but the story frames things like “you were a child,” or “you were brainwashed,” as insufficient to absolve Reiner.

SNK’s morals seem to dictate that Reiner gets no get out of jail free card.

He may have just been a kid. He may have been under duress, but he still broke the walls, so it’s all his fault.

Eren seconded that notion. Reiner said as much, and Eren agreed.

Reiner is indeed a half-assed piece of shit, and so is Eren.

Regardless of the circumstances or other extraneous factors at play, Eren is doing this, and that’s it.

One of the themes of SNK is that we own our actions. What we do has consequences and those consequences, in turn, are reflective of us. They illuminate our character.

Eren owns this.

There is no Attack Titan Svengali to scapegoat or excuses to be made.

Eren is killing billions of people for his race because that is who he is.

It’s who he always was.

Speaking of the series hopefully not reneging on its themes, I really hope Hange is dead and there is no afterlife.

That would be a really, *really* stupid idea.

SNK does not romanticize death.

When Erwin died, he was taken from Levi.

When Ymir died, she was taken from Historia.

When Floch died, he was taken from Eren.

Hange’s death was a tragedy. I understand Isayama wanted to send them off on a poetic note, and I hope that’s all this was.

It’s fine to symbolize a character making peace in death with what they did in life.

I do not want this to be the hint of an afterlife people are making it out to be.

Death in SNK has consequences.

When you die, your ability to contribute to this mortal world is done.

They could have brought Erwin back to fight for them, but they chose to let him die. His death was framed as an honorable discharge from duty.

When you die, the hopes, dreams, and beauty that was your life is extinguished. Everything you’ve worked for and built is out of your hands and in the control of your posterity.

Death is fundamentally a bad thing. The bad guys in SNK are the people who relish in mass genocide.

Marley.

Zeke.

Eren.

Death is momentous to the heroes of SNK, but to the villains, death is but a stepping stone to another, usually self-serving, goal.

Marley wishes death on Paradis so they can solidify their dominance over the world.

Zeke wishes death on the Eldians because he’s bent on taking his self-hatred out on his own people.

Eren wishes death on humanity because he’s been spat on his whole life, and now that he’s big and strong, he wants to flex on them.

Death is a bad thing, but if death means you get to live it up with all your friends and have a happy existence in the afterlife…is death really a bad thing?

I do not want this. No thanks.

…I actually like Hange’s death, btw.

I interpret the “afterlife” as just a poetic send off for their character, and on that level, it’s a good death.

So, I already talked about Eren’s role in the story, I guess I should pad things out with some talk about him as a character.

All throughout the story Eren has been focused on one goal: achieving freedom.

“freedom” is pretty vague though. You can be free in some ways, but unfree in others, and many people would still say you’re free overall.

What does freedom mean to Eren Yeager?

Eren has judged his freedom throughout the story by referencing his circumstances.

Titans right outside the door? Unfree.

Unable to go where he wishes? Unfree.

Victim of racist oppression? Definitely unfree.

Defining something in terms of what it’s not isn’t very ideal though.

So really, what is freedom to Eren?

Freedom for Eren meant being able to see the world.

Flaming water, frozen plains, sandy snowfields.

A lot of people misread this as meaning Eren’s goal was to see the world, but in truth that was just a means to an end.

Seeing the world was a gauge to Eren. It was a way to measure how free he was.

But that still doesn’t answer the question: what does freedom mean to Eren?

Well, in hindsight it was always obvious, but now we know for sure.

“Ever since I was born, there, before my eyes stood those miserable walls. Flaming water, frozen plains, snowfields on sand. I’m sure that the outside world is way bigger than the one inside of these walls. Anyone who saw those things would be the freest person in the world.”

Absolute power.

The power to break down any wall that stands in his way.

Marleyans, warriors, even his friends. Eren is free because he answers to no one. No one can stop him. No one can beat him. He is the god of this world.  

Freedom for Historia meant having her autonomy. The power to live for herself.

Freedom for Eren, in stark contrast, meant absolute domination.

Historia was fine with knowing that the whole world hates her guts and wants her dead, but not Eren. Historia would work to survive as best as she could, but she doesn’t pretend that those people aren’t human beings who deserve to live.

Not Eren.

His thought process is if you’re barreling towards conflict and you have the power to wipe them away easily, then why the fuck not?

We have nukes. We have the power to wipe out North Korea. Why the fuck not?

Eren’s solution to the cycle of violence is to be the last man standing in the end.

That’s the type of person Eren is.

Simple and ruthless.

It all comes back to power with him.

Want to end the cycle of violence?

Be stronger than anyone else.

Want to protect your friends?

Be strong enough to do it.

Want to be free?

Be strong enough to claim it for yourself.

And don’t be afraid to step on people to get it.

And that’s Eren in a nutshell.

What about Mikasa?

Let me say that at first I actually hated Mikasa.

She lost her family at a young age and she wants to protect her new one. That’s really sweet, but what really grated me was how utterly incapable she was at compartmentalizing that.

Protecting Eren was her only goal. She didn’t care about anything else.

She joined the military just to protect Eren, and it showed. There was always some friction whenever her orders conflicted with being able to protect Eren.

Her single-minded desire to protect Eren has consistently held her back. Strength isn’t a problem for her; her character flaw is that she cares too much for someone else.

Mikasa has to constantly be kept from flying off the handle whenever Eren is in trouble. When Eren needs rescuing, her brain turns off and she moves without thinking.

Usually someone manages to restrain her, but when that doesn’t happen, she usually does stupid shit.

Levi can tell you all about that.

My point is that Eren is someone prone to not thinking, and when that bites him, Mikasa starts not thinking too, and while that usually doesn’t bite her since she’s Mikasa, it still illustrates a bad dynamic.

The ultimate culmination of this toxic relationship is this story arc.

In 132, Mikasa refuses to say she’ll kill Eren. Instead she’s going to bring the old Eren back.

Like, fucking really?

“That man isn’t Ehreh, the man I love, he’s Eren, the Bad Guy!”

Mikasa is every abuse victim who keeps crawling back to their abuser.

Eren verbally abused Mikasa until she cried.

But instead of standing up for herself, she makes excuses for him.

First she was desperately trying to find some explanation for why he abused her, and now that it’s undeniable that Eren’s a lunatic, she’s settled on the old “I’m going to fix him” excuse.

Strength isn’t a problem for Mikasa; her character flaw is that she cares too much about Eren.

No one can deny that Eren and Mikasa’s relationship has devolved into an abusive one.

Don’t even try it.

I don’t think Mikasa’s confrontation with Eren will be as straightforward as people think.

Everyone expects Mikasa to overcome her unwillingness to kill Eren and do it.

I don’t know if that will happen or not, but I think it’s important not to lose sight of the fact that Eren is the main character and this is his story.

If we really are in a place where the main character is waiting to be killed off so the story can end…that’s pretty lame.

When Eren touched Historia’s hand, he saw the future.

Everything.

His attack on Marley, the Yeagerist rebellion, Falco.

Everything.

Are we really supposed to believe he didn’t see the Alliance coming for him?

That all this time, Eren knew he’d have to kill Mikasa to succeed?

That’s probably why Eren’s POV has been shrouded so much. Obviously this is something he’d be dwelling on a lot.

That’d fuel some good character drama going into the climax.

I think Mikasa will be the one who dies.

Eren is the main character, and it’s his story.

After everything he’s done, he can’t get off easy.

Being killed my Mikasa is too good for him. He’s going to die anyway, and while dying now means he failed, he won’t be able to experience that failure.

Eren doesn’t deserve to die.

No, he deserves to fail, and he deserves to live with that failure.

Eren is ostensibly doing all this to protect his friends, so the only way to truly punish him is to take those friends away from him.

Maybe throw in Historia too while we’re at it.

…That’s a dark note to end this on.

Uhm.

Hey, look!

4486 words!

\o/

[flakopancho]

on that russell brand wap video

video starts he is bored, by his tone,  with the song, cant be bothered to pronounce wap correctly, dismissive but has some insight..ok

he is more interested in what the media is saying about the song so he is being a gossip instead of an art critic off the bat but maybe he’d say social critic weak cop out with him reading the guardians definition of the video instead of what cardi and meg say or even give his own summary of the song also side note i heard the song and thought it was average and video was boring it also is weird to me we are stuck on the hamster wheel of female sexuality in rap at least like didnt lil kim foxy brown trina nicki minaj my neck my back my pussy and my crack already put a period on these convos when he says that cardi and meg are aspiring to the patriarchies values which completely duhumanizes them and takes their agency away, like they just actually enjoy their wet ass pussies and its a human value not a systematic inoculated value. so stfu there is no replicating values from males its just females getting to be female and it has nothing to do with hierarchy or patriarchy...which is revolutionary then she starts going on about TRADITIONAL VALUES so dumb , defining what men and women are generally but ignoring you cant apply averages to individuals and thats even ignoring the fact that bravery is considered male in his diatribe... then calling margaret thatcher a woman man and saying she expels male values like wtf do you hate yourself that much and see women and people who arent white as innocent pure sinless waifs....part of humanity is our potential for evil and dismissing that to sexism or racism is an insult on top of the pity conventional female values--- gagging maybe he didnt mean these things but talked about them from societies perspective but he still seems to be talking from that side---- there is nothing wrong with objectification he is a complete lunatic - you can objectify all day and still see humanity beyond the objectification - its fun to be objectified its fun to objectify its fun to make an object (art piece) of your self if that is your job as a visual artist like cardi and meg, and even if not everyone agrees objectification is good is my opinion void because it doesnt agree with yours what kind of revolution are we having here...and russell take your tattoos off then those are objects those are false idolss if meg and cardi lived in the perfect utopia that russel envisions, and wanted to express their sexuality - how would they do it without being objectified... focusing on the body or sadnesss or happiness apart from the complete humanity of someone is objectifying that one part and if we were in utopia it would still be consumed as a commodity...whats wrong with a commodity...exploitation of commodities through not paying workers or raising prices unfairly is wrong but just now the idea of commodity is wrong...isnt that video he is making to be a gossip also a commodity wap isnt doing enough cause it isnt calling out who has power in the systems that so dumb - go live in an artless world til everyone is fed then why is he wasting his time on philosophy of the mainstream people are starving out there. cardis bernie campaigning wasnt enough now her work and personal self expression needs to be exploited by your cause for revolution isnt a youtube video about as far away from a product as you can get - how is it different than making a vlog like he is doing - they both selling the product of themselves in both cases they are objectifying their authenticity its still the same aesthetic its the same values and ideals...uhhh no its not women in rap changed the definition of what men in america find attractive and in different time periods different body types were attractive cause it changes with cultures there was a womens body revolution and it has 99% percent to do with thicc women in hip hop not conforming to the "male" but i would say human standards of the 50s-80s at least 

before capitilism were their women owning their sexuality...yes so its not a product of capitalism we should be aspiring to an entirely different set of values not who has the power in these values...so he is saying cause women are taking power in the same system its not a good thing and shouldnt be celebrated..i do agree with that to a degree but i also could see the power shift as a step on the way to a different value system, but also im not going to be zealot and hate on cardi and meg for not having my same level of desire for a utopia revolution or a rapture i also dont see wap as a commentary on social structures just maybe dating when you are younger power which russell was a part of, like he says as ive gotten older my values have changed, welll then maybe the same will happen for the young women doing the same shit you were doing, old and wise is only old and wise when you dont see it as a personal revelation you had instead of seeing all older people change their values to more conservative back in my day bull shit so he is scared of power and attractive to him cause, o my god these women are so beautiful, the whole video is about his own sex addiction and blaming the pretty girls for getting grabbed on what are we looking for, something fun to dance to, something to give me confidence, something to make silly videos undermining the sexuality entirely, its not just porn porn porn like he is trying to claim so fucking stupid this russell brand video is the same as the ben shapiro i aint squeamish about sex but this is not making people equal....wtf are you talking about he also wont go as far to say what the ideologies cardi and meg are fighting which im curious about ooo so now he says meg and cardi dont need to be doing anything other than commodity, admits hes puritanical, sees it through a warped lense what was the point of this video. spend 15 minutes seemingly arguing that they are being too sexual, just capitalist pawns, not radicals and will make poor russell want to packer his peepee

then say in one minute well that was all bullshit and should cardi and meg be doing something different...no so dumb

[dearkaelsman]

I know that a lot of people (both CE and especially non CE and non Gundam passerbys) are probably looking at our ranting and wondering why we hate this redub. And like... I just want to make it clear, especially to potential new watchers that may think we’re nuts for having issue with the dub, we’re not angry with it just to be mean or spiteful. We’re disappointed. Ocean’s dub wasn’t god tier, but it meant a lot to western fans like us, and instead of polishing it, it rolled around in mud.

//THIS.

For me, SEED - in its original English dub glory - is why I was friends with the people I was in high school. It’s why I’m friends with the people I am now. It was the anime that first caused me to look up the voices behind characters, and the show that facilitated my learning about anime conventions, and the realm of RPing.

It (as well as discovering how much I enjoyed shooting hockey) heavily influenced why I went into photojournalism.

So the announcement of the re-dub, and now hearing it, kind of felt like a personal attack on my teenage self, given the show is really close to my heart. It sounds silly, but in a lot of ways it has contributed and been part of a foundation of the person I have become.

I know those of us expressing being upset about the re-dub/reflub aren’t attacking for the sake of being mean to the new cast, or out of spite. The actors involved have done a lot of good work on other projects, especially video games - I really enjoy Max Mittelman (redub Kira) as Ryuji in P5 and he’s probably my favourite character. I like Cassandra Lee Morris (redub Miriallia) as Morgana. Having met some of these voice actors, I can say I really like them personally, and love that we’re in an era where they can communicate with fans and show that they, too, are fans of the shows they work on, and I respect them for that.

I can respect that the original SEED dub may only be available in final mix form, and couldn’t be adjusted for the HD Remaster. I understand there are bidding processes, and the distribution company, Nozomi, that bought the rights to distribute the remaster, made the choice to go about redubbing it the way they did, likely because there is some legislation in place where “American” projects must have “American products” used (this caused some animosity between then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and then-President Barack Obama on a port project in B.C. that an American company was awarded the contract for. Obama would not allow Canadian materials or workers on the project, despite it taking place in Canada and it was all really messed up because of bureaucratic red tape).

I am, however, deeply disappointed that the product we’re getting for SEED, as you said, isn’t an improvement to the original, or polishing, it’s a complete bastardization of the original, and there’s no excuse for it.

SEED is not a simulcast. They recorded this project in 2017, weeks after they announced the re-dub cast. They’ve had over two years with this, so with them casting “big name” L.A. -based voice actors, it makes it look like they defaulted to the simulcast process, and were lazy with the project and didn’t put a lot of effort into the casting, the research of the show, or the show itself.

I’m hugely disappointed that the director chosen has a penchant for not doing research or understanding what she’s involved with as a voice actor, and was given SEED to work on for her directorial debut. I hoped she  would prove me wrong and that she’d take extra care with the project as director, but from what I’ve seen so far, she hasn’t.

She still has yet to acknowledge the original Ocean dub. The American “main” DBZ cast has NEVER shied away from acknowledging there was a Canadian dub. Kyle Hebert even credited Brad Swaile’s Gohan as being the first Gohan he ever heard, and that he incorporated some of his mannerisms into his performance.

Carrie Keranen (and granted, I haven’t checked since they were recording the project because she is the one Voice Actor I actually have a personal problem with so her Twitter makes me very upset) has flagrantly dismissed what was in that original dub, and why? Given how other redub projects have gone, it makes it look like she either wants to ignore the fact it exists as to not give it publicity, or looks down on it, and thought she could do better without putting the work into it that she should have.

She allowed script changes that ruined the integrity of the characters - allowing someone to portray Miriallia as a 10-year-old boy and say “fricken” like she actually is a 10 year old punk kid, modernizing Cagalli (she’s a princess, she shouldn’t talk entirely like a preteen girl at the mall, even if she had a penchant for running away), and stripping Kira of his attitude to be more...bland? In all honestly, she enabled a lack of effort and emotion in the scenes they’ve posted thus far.

She allowed liberties to be taken on the English language that were not taken in the original with no good explanation. This is seen in the pronunciation of Nicol, Tolle, Dearka’s names, the weird emphasis on Archangel, Gammow.

I’m deeply disappointed that she allowed/changed Dearka’s name to a racial slur, even if it’s one that only “white people” would consider a slur. Rather than being sensitive to how a choice of words can affect those around us, this decision actually perpetuates racism against Middle Eastern people, as if there’s not enough of that already. It also creates a divide between the longtime die-hard fans of Gundam SEED, and the new ones with pronunciation (and this has happened with other redub projects where fans have been lectured the “new” way is the “right” way to say things even when it’s not), ESPECIALLY if a movie comes out now, which will make officially make her cast the “main” English cast, and everything the old cast did will essentially be erased from the collective fandom mind.

As a Canadian, I’m also disappointed at what redubbing one of the larger anime projects to come through Ocean/Vancouver means for the voice industry here.I’m hugely concerned, and I have been for some time for my favourite voice actors, and it’s easier to express this concern with regards to a specific project, than just in general.

It’s hard to know that B.C. is becoming the “Silicon Valley of the North,” and animation studios here are doing exceptional work (Into the SpiderVerse was done in Vancouver, The Dragon Prince is animated in Vancouver/Kelowna, the new Magic the Gathering series will be animated by the same studio, they’ve done a ton of work for Disney, Cartoon Network, DreamWorks etc.), and yet our voice actors are being forced to move, take up side jobs/new careers, when they should be voicing those projects, in favour of L.A. based dubbers who sadly don’t seem to put the effort into their projects that B.C. was able to.

They had an opportunity to make the redub decent, and they squandered it, and they’re really overselling the idea that in a digital age people weren’t already aware of SEED. The only people who will watching it “fresh” now are the type that are obsessive about specific voice actors and would worship the ground they walked on, rather than really enjoy a show for the show’s own merit.

And given what they’re doing to it in this dub, they’re going to actually make more people hate the series than already do.