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thisblogisaboutabook · 10 months ago

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Wicked Felina (The Girl That I Love)

Part 1 - El Paso

Azriel x Reader - Angst - Smut - MDNI

The darkness within her became his obsession. She was his. Didn’t she know? When Azriel spies his wicked mate with another male, when he kills that male, what he knows as life shifts eternally. No longer is there life. No longer is there death. There is only Felina. Felina who has many secrets.

Series Masterlist - Part 2

Warnings: threat of self-harm/suicide, assumed character death (you’ll see), implied rape/non-con (some gross, shitty males discussing it in a tavern), dub-con, violence, obsession, dark themes, sexual content

One hour ago

Rhysand

All Rhys knew was that when Azriel returned from what was supposed to be a short inspection of the Illyrian war camps, he was different. His shadows whirred violently; his eyes… there was a darkness in them that he’d not seen even within the depths of harrowing interrogations; and while his scent remained his usual cedar chilled mist an iron tang tinged it.

“Az?” Rhys asked cautiously, trailing his brother up the stairs

“Not now.” Azriel growled, clenched fists shaking, pupils blown wide, sweat beading his brow.

Rhys said nothing more, following the frantic male to his room. Well- until Azriel slammed the door shut in his face.

Message received.

A few minutes later, Azriel re-emerged into the living area, a packed duffel bag in tow.

“Az? Talk to me.” Rhys pleaded. Fighting against the urge to dive into his mind. Azriel’s shields were ironclad but Rhys could break through them if absolutely necessary.

“Just stop. I’m fine.” Azriel growled.

He sure as shit didn’t look fine.

“I need to go handle some personal things. I have never asked for leave for anything. Can you please just allow me a couple of weeks?”

The High Lord’s brows creased, voice raising “Weeks? With no provided reasoning?”

“I said that it was personal.”

“As your employer, I can accept that it’s personal. As your family, Az, come on. What happened?”

“I’m leaving whether you grant me this or not.”

Azriel and Rhysand had many battle-of-wills over the years but this was different. Rhys could feel it in the very marrow of his bones.

And Azriel’s demeanor - Fuck, he’d always been dangerous but he was outright predatory in the moment.

Rhys shook his head. “I should kick your ass for talking to me like this but fine - go. Two weeks, Azriel, and then you’re back here or I tear the world apart looking for you. You aren’t abandoning us without reason. I will not accept it.”

Azriel’s only response was a tick of the jaw before stepping out the front door and launching skyward at breakneck speed.

Rhys spent the next hour nursing a glass of whiskey, fighting an internal battle of leaving his brother be or going to find him. Just when he began to lose that battle and head out searching, Cassian burst through the door. His hair disheveled from the wind and caked with blood, his eyes puffy and red as if he’d been crying the entire flight.

Rhys froze in his tracks at the sight of his brother who took a few steps forward before falling to the floor, knees giving out as he let out a deep, world-shattering scream.

Rhys sent his darkness to caress his mind, gently prodding for what could have left Cassian in such a state only to be met with crushing waves of grief. Rhys pushed his consciousness with great effort to cut through the viscous surge of emotion desperate for any sense of clarity.

He’d almost reached his own daemati limit when he was abruptly greeted by flashes of memory. Snow painted bright-red with blood. Azriel laying limp. Ash arrows littering his body. Lifeless hazel eyes. Long dark hair. Red lips. Eyes darker than night. Sounds of a female voice screaming. Tears falling onto blood coated hands.

Suddenly Rhys was thrust from Cassian’s mind as he fought against the induced slumber. Cassian’s body shuttered as tears broke free once again. His words slurred as he tried to communicate within his half dazed state, “Go. Ste-steppes.” Another broken sob. “Az is d- Oh gods!” He cried out. “Dead. And s-she’s”

“Who?” Rhys’ mind flashed to the female crouched over Azriel, screaming.

“Oh fuck, R-rhys. Go!!!”

Cassian fell back into his dream state before Rhys could press further.

Rhys willed himself to remain as calm as possible. Fighting to keep his mental voice steady before the grief could overtake him as he called for Amren and Feyre.

Elain, who had been in the garden, would stay with Nyx. Amren would keep an eye on Cassian and throw additional wards up, while Feyre retrieved Nesta from the House of Wind. Once Feyre returned she would be able to soothe his mind.

Feyre’s mental voice wavered, heartbreak surging through the bond at the news, but she agreed to keep details private until Rhys understood exactly what had happened.

——————

Three weeks ago

Azriel

War Camp inspections had a way of bringing out the worst in Azriel. As if his tolerance level for Illyrians was not already at a miniscule level, these inspections always seemed to inflate the egos of the Illyrians. Camp Lords and their cronies marching into meetings with puffed out chests and mouths spewing hatred particularly grated on his typically infallible patience.

Azriel had been staying at the River House for some time now, carefully avoiding Elain as much as possible, and trying his best to avoid giving Rhys anything to pull rank over. And fuck, he was so tired after a day of negotiations. With nothing but tension awaiting him at home and overwhelming fatigue, he found himself at a shitty Inn in the Illyrian Steppes.

He’d seated himself at a small corner table, shrouding himself in shadow as he observed the belligerent patrons of Rosa’s Cantina, a shoddy tavern attached to the Inn.

“Witch.” He heard a group of males call her. Their eyes fixed on a stunning female swaying her hips in time to the music flowing from a rickety piano at the front of the bar.

Remaining silent, the Spymaster listened to the ruddy males lecherous conversation.

“I wouldn’t mind being under her spell.”

“You’ll sooner find your balls nailed to a stake than completion - even with tits like that it’s not worth it.”

Azriel snarled to himself. Even outside of the Illyrian camps, the males in the Steppes were abhorrent. Backwards in every way. The woman continued twirling, her raven-black hair flowing with each movement of her supple body.

“Not if I tie her down first.” A burly male chimed in, his slurred voice gruff.

“I’ll bet you five marks that you won’t survive the encounter with all of your appendages.”

“Look at what the whore is wearing. She wants it whether she knows or not.”

The brute of a male stumbled up to her and Azriel sighed to himself, he really didn’t want to get into it tonight. But….

The male put his greasy hands on her and Azriel instantly jolted upright, preparing to step in. She tried pulling away as the male yanked her into him. The female whirled in his arms, looking up to him like a lover. The male immediately dropped his arms, palms in the air as if placating a wild animal, he began stepping away slowly. When he turned around, Azriel noticed the blood drained from his face as he threw gold marks on the table and immediately left the cantina. The males only laughed and went back to their drinking.

“Wicked Felina” they called her.

“Eh? How much money have you won off the males she scares away now?” One of the patrons chimed in.

“Enough to cover these boys.” The male slapped the new pair of leather boots adorning his feet.

Azriel hadn’t seen what the male saw in her face when she looked to him but his shadows whispered to him.

“Darkness”

“Like calls to like”

“Look”

And maybe it was the stale mead he’d downed but he did. He strode right up to the female and could have sworn he felt time stand still as the patrons of the bar watched.

He didn’t touch her, only spoke in a low tone, “May I have a dance?”

The female whirled towards him and Azriel had to fight to keep his footing steady. Before him stood the most breathtaking female he’d ever seen.

Her eyes met his and his heart sputtered as he stared into the depth of them. Blacker than night, constellations and blood and something “other” swimming inside of them. He could sense her darkness and instead of his typical urge to question, it drew him in like metal to a magnet.

As she took him in, he heard her heart skip a beat for only a moment, before that darkness invaded his senses once again. No, it wasn’t darkness to run away from at all. It was alluring, captivating, dangerous. And he wanted to drink it all in.

“You are a brave male.” She spoke with a slight, unfamiliar accent. So similar to those of Velaris but with something else mixed in.

Azriel’s shadows whirled around the female, winding through her hair and between her fingers. She didn’t balk from them, she only remained intensely focused on him.

Her scent surrounded them and he couldn’t breathe the female in deeply enough.

An hour later he found himself driving into her. Her breasts bouncing so beautifully that he nearly came from the sight alone. He’d spent so long fisting his cock as he fantasized of Elain that he’d forgotten just how glorious the feel of a tight cunt wrapped around him felt. And this female, Felina, her moans were like a sirens call, drawing him so deeply into her that he didn’t know where she ended and he begun.

He would have gone slowly with her, tenderly, worshipped every centimeter of cool, exposed skin, but she had begged him so prettily to fuck her until she forgot what she was. Who was he to deny a female who knew exactly what she wanted. He’d never fucked a female so hard and still she pleaded for more, sensing that he was holding back. When he finally let go of his restraint, he had to dig his nails into her moonlight pale flesh just to keep her from sliding away. She bit her lip and held his gaze through every thrust. Those damning eyes looking at him like she could read every fucking tendril of his own inner-void.

When she came, he came with her. The Inn shaking with the intensity of their combined orgasms. As he came down from the high, the darkness in her eyes banked momentarily a deep, blue flashing in them before once again overtaking them. He gasped sharply as a snap yanked in his chest. Gold tethering him to her.

“Mate” his shadows sang

“Our mate, our mate.”

Azriel’s breathing grew frantic. She climbed out of the bed, her exposed backside red from the slaps he’d pressed to her round ass. “Did you feel that?”

She turned her head over her shoulder, those eyes meeting his again. “Feel what?”

Azriel’s heart sank. “Nothing.”

“Hm.” She shrugged. “Intresting.” And poured a glass of water from a pitcher on an oak dresser with nonchalance. As if they hadn’t just had life-altering sex, like the ground itself hadn’t shook with the force of their coupling.

Her mouthwatering breasts bounced with each step toward him, her lightly toned abdomen baring silver, faded scars.

“Who gave you those?” Azriel asked.

“I’m as willing to talk about them as you are about those.” She nodded toward his hands.

Touché

“Curiosity can be a dangerous thing.” She stated before bringing his head to her chest and running delicate fingers through his hair until he drifted into a deep slumber full of darkness and a golden thread.

When he woke, she was gone.

And he would have thought he’d dreamt it all, had it not been for the nearly-healed crescent moon imprint of her nails littering his body. He hummed in satisfaction at the sight.

He only hoped that next time she’d leave marks deep enough to scar. He should have staked his claim on her too.

——————

Two weeks ago

Azriel

He searched for her, frantically, day in and day out but she was nowhere to be found. How could he have found his mate and been so foolish to lose her in such a short period of time. He hadn’t even told her his name.

Eventually, he had to take pause, and venture into the camps due to a couple of missing Illyrians. Through his questioning, he’d found that the males were shaking, reporting a fanged creature that swept from the trees and picked off several of their men, one by one. When they returned to reclaim the bodies, all that was left were scattered body parts. Fingers, tongues, and cocks mostly.

He remembered the whispers in the taverns of “Wicked Felina.” Surely it was just paranoia.

Azriel returned to the tavern each night, hiding outside within his shadows. She was never there.

His patience was infallible, no amount of space or time would deter him. He would find his mate, he would embrace that pit of darkness dwelling within her - even if she were the creature the men were speaking of. She hadn’t hurt him, she’d only awoken something within him. His Felina may be dark but she is not the villain. She couldn’t be.

He pushed the sight of the ghostly pale brute running away from her at Rosa’s far into the back of his mind.

——————

One week ago

Azriel

Something tugged at him that night, urged him to find her again. Felina had become the focal point of his thoughts, consumed with her 24/7.

He was a desperate male, he wanted - no, needed - to know every piece of this dark anomaly. Mind, body, spirit. He’d sought someone whose light cast upon his obsidian soul for so long - finding hope in the radiant enigma that is Mor and the gentle, sweet presence of Elain. But all along the mother knew he needed someone who could step into his shadow and find solace. When Felina stared into his eyes, he knew she saw it, saw home. He saw it in her too.

She was so new to him and yet so familiar.

His brothers would tell him he was infatuated, that this was just another Mor, but they would be so far from the truth. This was a need, as essential to him as water or air. He thrummed with desire for his Wicked Felina.

She was the other half of his soul and he would not lose out on the opportunity to make her his.

Tonight was the night, she’d be there, he felt it deep within.

And she was.

Not inside. No, in a dark corner of the alley adjacent to Rosa’s Cantina. With a silver haired High-Fae male, nearly as tall as Azriel, muscled, well-groomed.

And she - her back was pressed against the wall. Her head flung back from the crook of his neck it where her face had been burrowed, pure ecstasy written all over those seductive features. A moan escaping her plush lips.

And then he saw it. Blood trickling from the corner of her mouth.

No.

This couldn’t be.

He HURT her. She didn’t want this. Didn’t she know that he was her soul-bonded mate? She wouldn’t fuck someone in the dark corner of an alley willingly.

Didn’t she know she was better than that? Didn’t she know she was everything?

Visions of the scars on her abdomen and of the male who joked about tying her down to have his way with her came to mind.

No. Not his Felina. Nobody would harm her now that she was his.

Azriel didn’t think further as he barreled for them, unsheathing truth-teller and slitting the males throat before he could even lock eyes with him.

Felina let out a quiet inhale of shock, onyx eyes blown wide.

“No. No. No.” She dropped to the male. Her nostrils flaring at the sight of him, his bloodied neck, checking for a pulse.

There was none.

Felina looked up to him with near-black, pleading eyes. “Azriel.”

And despite the peril of the moment, the fact that he clearly misread the situation, his name rolling off those pretty red lips made it all worth it.

Until the thought occurred to him. He’d never told her his name. “How?”

“Az….” Her voice cracked, the slightest bit of silver lined her eyes before darkness began radiating from her, rage filling those deeper than night eyes. Her voice became cold, deadly. “I told you that curiosity was dangerous.”

Shouts from bystanders rang out, creating panic among the villagers.

“You need to go now. They’ll recognize you.”

He paused, mouth gaping as she looked to him. He knew what she was saying but remained frozen in place.

“Azriel, please!” She cried.

There it was. His name again. Had she been as taken by him as he was by her? Had she sought him out too?

It was then that she unsheathed a dagger and held it to her own throat. “If you don’t leave, I will end it all right now.”

If he’d have looked closely, he would have seen the way her hand shook, the way she couldn’t quite touch the blade to her pale skin.

“I will find you again, Felina.” He vowed - threatened - Don’t even think about escaping me. You’re mine.

“Go.” She mouthed.

——————

Four hours ago

Azriel

Staying away for days was impossible. When she’s wander at night, he’d watch her from afar, remaining unseen. The small village mourned the dead male, apparently the esteemed ruler of this shit hole place. He caught glimpses of a mourning Felina. He felt something in the bond but he couldn’t quite make it out.

Resentment, perhaps? Jealousy? Longing?

And despite the black apparel she donned through the village, her face remained neutral with only a tinge of sadness.

Villagers whispered as she walked by. She paid them no mind.

He imagined they likely suspected the death was over her. Azriel’s shadows reported he had a wife. Why would his Felina sleep with a married male? If he was willing to cheat on his wife with her, he couldn’t have been a good male. Azriel did right by the females for eliminating him from the picture, right?

It was then that a flash of auburn appeared. The male’s wife with several large males behind her carrying torches. “Whore!” She spat. “Only fucking my husband wasn’t good enough, was it?”

“You had to sleep around with another male, one you surely had under your spell, just as you had with mine. You vile witch! And now my husband is dead because some enchanted soul grew jealous over you. You will burn for this!”

Suddenly she was placed in shackles, his shadows zooming into her vision. She must have noticed them as she whipped her head searching for him. She mouthed “no”, shaking her head in the direction his shadows raced off to. They came back.

“Blue not black. Blue not black.”

“Still beating. Still beating.”

“Mate. Mate. Mate.”

It was then that wings burst out of her back. Like Illyrian wings but white, the light casting a holographic range of gentle hues of blues and purple, and pinks. Talons emerged from her nails, but her lovely face remained impassive.

His shadows stirred aggressively.

“Alike. Alike. Alike.”

Another shadow shot back to him, beginning to report something when Azriel saw the pyre lighting in town as the villagers threw obscenities in her direction.

Felina held her head high, accepting her fate so easily.

The fire grew and Azriel once again acted on instinct. They couldn’t take her from him. And to burn her? Rage roared within him.

Azriel flew in, obliterating the large males jerking her toward the fire.

“The Shadowsinger!” someone cried out. Azriel saw nothing but Felina and the rising flames. Never would his mate be subjected to licks of flame marring her flesh. She was far too precious to burn.

Anyone who tried to lay hands on he or Felina were eviscerated. “The key!” She cried, pointing to a dead male. She ran toward it. Azriel launched in front of her, his speed overtaking hers as he retrieved it. She caught the key but her talons made it impossible to unlock the chains quickly. Azriel grabbed the key, unshackling her, the talons and wings disappearing.

“We have to go!” She shouted. Azriel caught her, launching skyward, right as an arrow shot toward them, and straight into Azriel’s back. He fought through it, he had to get her to safety. Another arrow flew through the air, narrowly missing Felina. The attempt on his mate triggering a knee-jerk reaction in Azriel who turned to send a blast of power at the bastard shooting the arrows.

He was struck in the side as another arrow met him. Azriel shot another blast of power in the direction that it came from.

Azriel could feel power rumbling under Felina’s surface. “We don’t have time! You’re hurt.”

Azriel bit back a cry at the pain radiating through his body, the blood not slowing as it should. He began feeling faint, fevered. He struggled through it, needing to make it as far away as he could but his vision began to blur as his body weakened. Felina was crying out something but he couldn’t hear her. All there was was pain and the cool press of her body against his. Gods, she was so cold.

“We need to land, Azriel! You can’t make it further.” She commended. He felt the sting of her palm on his face. “Wake up! Land!”

The slap along with her frantic voice roused Azriel enough to land them, very roughly. He crashed down on top of her.

“Felina….” He rasped.

“Shh.” She hushed him. “Save your breath. I’m okay.” Reassuring him through staggered breaths. “We need to get you to help.”

Azriel placed a hand on hers. “Too far. There’s nothing.”

“There’s got to be something!” She choked out.

Commotion erupted from the trees as a group of males from the village drew toward them. Their torches lighting the night and their bows drawn and ready.

Azriel used the little remaining might he had to push himself up. Felina throwing herself on top of him, her hands coated in his blood.

“I’m sorry for this, Azriel.” She spoke and ripped the poisoned arrow out of him, stabbing it right into her bicep. “Fuck!” She cursed. Suddenly the talons and wings were back. Her scent shifted into something so fucking familiar that it made Azriel’s heart ache, and screams echoed as she shot bursts of power at them. The range was short and the damage limited but it slowed them.

A commotion distracted the group of males as flares of red shot from the brush. A large winged male approaching from the night.

“Cass.” Felina whispered in awe.

Azriel’s vision went dark again, his conscious only picking up on words as the males screaming became less and less with each blast of power from Cassian and Felina.

A light caress came over Azriel’s mind, stroking it into submission, his pain easing. This was it. He wasn’t going to make it out of here.

And at that moment the caress broke free, Felina releasing a piercing scream. He tried moving, tried to console his mate, but the arrow that had just lodged in his heart was too much.

Azriel fought to see her one last time, her darkened eyes now shining like the night itself.

“Mate.” He whispered.

“I know, Azriel. I know.” She sobbed. Caressing his face with those delicate, chilly hands.

All Azriel remembered was the darkness embracing him once again. The pain easing as he heard Cassian’s voice.

“How?” Cassian’s booming voice cracked.

“Later, Cassian. He needs help.” Her voice was so pitiful. Broken.

Azriel’s breathing grew so shallow, that sweet darkness lulling him, even his shadows were silent. All he saw in his mind was her but she was fading. Her touch no longer registering to his senses.

He tried fighting it but there was no use as Azriel took his final breath.

“He’s dead, Cassian.”

——————

Two hours ago

Cassian

Cassian had never flown so fast in his life.

Oh gods, his brother was dead. The female, she refused to leave his side until he left to get Rhys.

His mind roared at him that he should have brought her with him. But why? Who was she?

Who was she to Azriel?

All he could remember as the tears flowed freely was that his brother was dead. That he heard the call for help from the village, that the Shadowsinger had gone mad, only to find a group of men on the attack and his brother incapacitated.

He had to get to Rhys quickly and let him know about Azriel, about the female.

——————

Present

Rhysand

Rhys winnowed to the vicinity of where Cassian had been in the memories when he’d held his mind. He flew until he found the bodies of several men. This was the clearing Cassian had been in and in the center of the clearing was caked blood.

Caked blood and no Azriel. No female.

But the blood, there was so much. He couldn’t have survived.

Right?

——————

Two hours ago

Azriel

The darkness on Azriel’s mind eased only slightly. The crippling pain too much to bear.

He opened his eyes to his version of heaven, to his mate’s face. The arrow removed from her arm.

He was in so much pain only managing to rasp out, “Can’t leave you.”

“You have to make a choice now.” She cupped his hand. “There was no other way.” She spoke to herself more than him. “There’s no way Cassian could have made it back in time.”

She was trying to convince herself. His decision was already made.

She shook her head, bracing herself for his response. “You have only a few moments left.”

The black fog cleared from his mind, every ounce of pain returning, but his eyes opened.

“Look at me, Azriel.”

He blinked and where her canines had been were sharp fangs. “I can save you but I can’t guarantee this existence is worth it. I am still figuring it out for myself.”

To his credit, Azriel didn’t balk. A chance to be with his mate… his Felina. He groaned as he turned his head, exposing his neck to her.

“Azriel, if I do this. You are bound to me. I know I’m your mate but you don’t know me. What if I’m… too much? Can you bare that?”

He tried to speak. She would never be too much. He only kept his neck exposed, a warning rattle escaping his chest.

“I’m sorry.” She whispered, as she pressed her fangs into his neck.

Blinding light erupted through him along with the worst pain he’d felt in centuries. Tears fell from those otherworldly eyes of night onto his neck.

He fought through the pain, biting back screams. He would be strong for her.

As she drank, she caressed his hair. A slight whimper and the scent of arousal escaping her. She tensed as she recognized the scent. And he could feel a hint of shame from her end of the bond.

Azriel had only heard legends of vampyr’s. Stories told in the camps to scare children who were prone to wandering off and now here she was feeling shame for her own body’s response to having him at the most intimate level.

As she drank, little gulps escaping her, he felt his strength returning. He raised a hand and grabbed her breast, massaging it as she lapped at his blood. A silent communication that whatever she was feeling did not frighten him, was not unwelcome.

Her body relaxed only slightly but he could sense her relief.

The pain began subsiding and Azriel’s strength had already returned in full, in excess, even.

Her drinking slowed and she fought against the urge to keep drinking, the greedy need for blood raging through her.

Azriel raised his hand from her breast to her face, stroking his thumb across her cheek. She leaned into it, grounding herself.

Suddenly she pulled herself off, gasping. Her chest heaving. Pain filled her eyes as she stared up at him. But he felt… incredible. Euphoric.

And there his mate was, reeking of sweet arousal. Chest heaving. Trickles of blood dripping from her mouth.

“You have to go now, Azriel. Get what you need and come back to me.”

He could hardly think. His need to be inside of her overwhelming every sense.

“Azriel. Listen!” She spoke firmly. “You have a couple of hours at most. Go home, get any healing tonics or sedatives that you may have, clothes, and blankets and come right back here.”

“I don’t-“ he started.

“You will. Can you still winnow?”

Azriel nodded. Had he winnowed in front of her before?

“Go. Now. Before Cassian gets home and bombards you with questions.”

Azriel didn’t want to leave, growing irate at the thought of it.

“I know it’s hard for you to leave. It’s a culmination of our newly tethered bond and likely the mating bond, Azriel.”

He stayed in place.

Finally she approached him. Staring straight past his eyes and into the depths of his soul as the urge to obey her taking overtook him. “Go now.”

Without another word, he left, winnowing directly to the River House, collecting a bag, and leaving Rhys with far too many questions. He prayed to the mother that he wouldn’t track him.

——————

One week later

Azriel

She’d begged him not to take her but she was declining far too quickly. They’d spent the past seven days in a daze. He had quickly gone from euphoric to delirious once returning from the River House.

And just as he’d made a life altering choice to be eternally bonded to her when she’d turned him, Felina made the choice to accept the mating bond by allowing him to feed off of her.

The combination of blood lust and the mating frenzy sent him into a spiral. They barely talked in the past few days, they’d have eternity to do that. He spent more time inside of her than out but she… she refused to feed off of him, citing that it was too risky with his newly turned state. When he wasn’t rutting into her, he was hunting for game but the blood wasn’t enough for her. He cursed himself for taking so much of her blood in his frenzied state.

She repeatedly asked that he not take her to his family but they would understand. It was the only option at this point. Her scent began shifting into that strange familiar aroma again, the darkness of her eyes swirling with flecks of blue. That “other” aspect to her diminishing slightly.

As she fought her consciousness, she barely managed to whisper “There’s more.” before going unconscious.

He’d waited so long to find his mate.

She’d saved him.

He didn’t want to go against her wishes but her condition was deteriorating rapidly. Her fever raising, her once-cool skin now burning as whimpers escaped her lips.

He did the only thing he could and prayed to the Mother that Felina would forgive him.

He flew her home.

They landed on the River House lawn in the middle of the night. Rhys appeared with a crack of thunder to confront the threat that breached his wards. Feyre, Elain, Cassian, and Nesta rushing out behind him, their eyes wide with shock.

Rhys shuddered, falling to his knees before his brother. “Azriel. Thank the mother you’re home.” He sobbed.

Felina let out a pitiful moan. Sweat beading on her brow. Her cool skin now radiating waves of heat. She slowly, weakly opened her weary eyes, the swirling black now bleeding into a blend of ultraviolet blue.

Rhys approached the female in his arms, Azriel tightening his grip on her. Time stood still as Rhys gently touched her face, carefully turning her head toward him. His face of relief crumpling into something earth shattering, the mountains quaking as he fell to his knees.

Azriel started, “This is Felina, my m-“

Rhys interrupted shaking his head as let out pained, joyous laughter. “No, Az.” He choked out. “Not Felina.”

Fighting to regain composure, Rhys clarified. “That’s Y/N.”

Azriel gasped as those now violet-blue eyes peered up into his, his jaw dropping as he carefully went to his knees with her in his arms.

That scent. Those eyes of night. Azriel’s mate was-

Rhys gave a disbelieving smile his voice again breaking at the sight before him.

“My sister.”

——————————————

A/N: Thank you for reading! For now, this is a one-shot. I have left openings in the story with the potential for it to become a series or at least part two with an explanation but have not yet decided.

This fic is loosely inspired by an old-western song called “El Paso” that I listened to growing up with my grandmother. The song is where I chose my pen name of “Felina” from. You may also recognize “Wicked Felina” as the title of the final episode of the show “Breaking Bad”

ACOTAR general tag list: @lilah-asteria

#acotar angst #acotar #a court of thorns and roses #Azriel #Azriel x reader #Rhysand #Cassian #azriel shadowsinger #sarah j maas #a court of silver flames #a court of wings and ruin #a court of mist and fury #a court of frost and starlight #Shadowsinger

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allthesmutl0vers · 4 months ago

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The Weight of Blood: Tom/Theo/Draco/Regulus/Fem!Reader (A/N--TW--Prologue)

NSFW,MDNI,18+,Triggering Content Masterlist Pairing: Tom Riddle/Theo Nott/Draco Malfoy/Regulus Black/Fem!Reader Comments and Reblogs are always appreciated. Summary: When students return to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry for their final year, their biggest obstacle is passing their final exams. At least, that’s how it should be. But life has never been that easy for y/n. Between juggling the rocky, and some would say, an abusive relationship she has with one quidditch star, Cormac McLaggen, and cramming for her exams, she never finds the time to enjoy the things she loves. Ice skating, reading by the fire, riding a broom, or taking a walk through the forbidden forest to look for animals to capture with her camera. Little does she know, a storm is brewing. A storm that could rip away everything she holds dear, upending her life, even threatening to end it once and for all. A storm that is caused by the perceived weight her blood holds against those who hold the title weight, pure-blood. Being driven straight into the walls of the castle by four very handsome, very dangerous Slytherin boys. But will her being caught in the eyes of these boys be enough to change the direction of the wind? Or will they leave her to fight for herself in the eye of the storm? Only time will tell. If there is enough of it, at least. “I wouldn’t call it love. I’d call it an obsession.” - Tom Riddle IMPORTANT NOTE: This is a DARK ROMANCE, please take a look at the trigger warnings, and make sure you are comfortable reading this story before you start it. This story may not be for everyone. This is a multi-part story. I will be updating it as well as 'Managing Mischief' (Weasley Twins/Fem!Reader) throughout the week. You can click below to read more. But don't say I didn't warn you.

Author’s Note

This story is a fan-fiction. I do not own any of the characters, places, or situations within this story besides those that I create.

Please do not print, bind, or sell this work, as it would be an illegal act. Keep our writers and stories safe, legal, and free for all to enjoy.

This is a dark romance. Some situations/actions may be triggering/unsuitable for some.

With all of that being said, please read the Content and trigger Warnings.

Your Mental Health Matters.

Domestic Violence Hotline: (Call) 800-799-723 (Text-BEGIN) to 88788

Suicide Prevention Hotline: (Text/Call) 988

Self-Harm Hotline: (Call) 1-800-366-8288 (Text-CONNECT) to741741

Sexual-Assult Hotline: 1-800-656-4673

You are not alone.

It is not your fault.

The world is better with you in it.

My DMs are open if you need someone to talk to. Or simply someone to listen.

Content and Trigger Warnings

Abusive Relationship: Slapping, Non-Con Touching (mentioned only), Rape (mentioned only), Degradation (and not the kind we like), Humiliation, One On-Page Punch (past ones implied), Victim Blaming, Revenge Porn.

Violence: Fist Fights, Magical Cursing, Blood, Attempted Drowning, Knife To Throat Threats

Character Death

Depression

Attempted Suicide

Self-Harm

HEAVY Smut: One-On-One, Three, Four, and Fivesome scenes.

Heavy BDSM: Bondage, Magical Restraints, Spanking, Choking, Dom/Sub Relationships, Ownership Kink, Shared Ownership Kink, Sir Kink, Voyeurism/Exhibitionism, Semi-Public Sex, Primal Play, Knife Play, Blood Play, Marking/Branding Kinks, Orgasm Denial/Control, Edging, Overstimulation, Double Penetration, Anal Sex, Oral Sex (Male and Female Receiving), Breeding Kink.

Found Family

Betrayal

Discrimination: Based on blood-status.

Bullying

This story is Multi-POV, but primarily told from the Reader’s point of view.

Dedication

For all of us who have dreamed of being rescued, only to realize we had the power all along.

Prologue

Tom

Blood status amongst wizards and witches is the most powerful, most prominent, and most valuable thing we possess. Without it, how would we know who is worthy of our time? Or, more importantly, our loyalty.

Or so I’ve always been taught.

Even in the summer, the manor is dark, casting shadows along the cold corridors as we all gather for the first official meeting. Inside the grand dining room of Malfoy Manor, the parents are anxious, wondering if it’s a trap. Not that I blame them for keeping their children close to them. But those I have grown to think of as friends can handle their own. As they’ve proved not just their abilities, but their loyalty a hundred times over.

My parents died long ago, not that I care. Why should I? I never met them. My father was a filthy muggle, and my mother a blood-traitor who died for love of all things. Not that anyone knows that. They couldn’t, and they never will.

The door opens, and in walks our leader. The head of the charge against mud-bloods, is here to lead us into putting them in their rightful place, beneath our feet. Wirely and unruly black hair that hangs to her waist and long black robes that hang loosely around her frame, she steps up to the head of the table.

“You may be seated,” she says calmly, but her tone is also commanding. Everyone sits down around the table, myself included. Not daring to speak, not daring to ask the first question. She takes a long sip of her wine before leaning on the table, propping herself on her elbows as her fingers interlock.

“Firstly, I would like to thank you all for joining me here this evening. As I’m sure you are well aware, we are under attack,” she says stiffly. “Mud-bloods have never been more common than they are now. Threatening to throw everything we hold most dear out of order,” she looks around. “But no longer will we stand for it. No longer will we be seated at a table with those who don’t deserve to sit.”

“Hear, hear,” Mr. Nott says cheerfully, raising his now fourth glass of wine.

Bellatrix smiles and nods once. “Our biggest issue, as of now, is getting more people to come on board. These progressionistic,” she seethes. “People in the ministry and confirmed blood-traitors, are most unlikely to accept the eradication of muggle-born individuals. So, how do we combat this?” She asks openly.

Lucius clears his throat. “May I suggest, instead of death, exile instead?”

Stupid suggestion.

Bellatrix sits back in her seat as if pondering the ridiculous idea. “To allow them to continue mating and breeding on their own accord?” She says with a tone dripping in disappointment. “Free of any repercussions?” Lucius opens his mouth to speak again when she stops him, raising her hand. “Any other ideas?”

“My lady,” Mrs. Nott speaks up, setting down her glass of wine. “Perhaps we re-visit the ideals and ideas of Grindelwald?” Bellatrix nods for her to continue. “It seems it would be much easier to control the mud-bloods, should we have the muggles fighting alongside us,” Almost everyone snickers at the idea. “As mundane and contradictory as it may seem, there are more muggles than us. Should we find some way to control them and will them to fight for us, we could overthrow the ministry. Implement our laws and ideals, then control everyone.”

Bit ambitious and a far stretch, but the idea is there.

“Where is Grindelwald right now, Mrs. Nott?” Bellatrix asks simply.

“Pardon?” Mrs. Nott asks with a confused expression.

“Theodore,” Bellatrix turns to her son instead. “Remind your dear mother where Grindelwald is at present.”

Theo clears his throat, sitting up straighter. “Azkaban, Ms. Lestrange,” he answers cooly.

“Azkaban. That is correct,” she nods at Theo with a smile before turning to the rest of us. “I would like to remind everyone that muggles are not our concern. They are less than a speck of dirt. What we need to focus on is reestablishing pure-blood family lines. Now, how do we gain control without killing? Use your heads.”

“Capture,” I answer calmly.

“And then?” Bellatrix asks me with a smile.

“Put them in their rightful place, of course. Serving us. Our every whim and desire,” I answer, taking a sip of my bourbon.

Bellatrix smiles and nods. “Yes, yes. Make them fight for us, serve us,” she ponders. “Very good, Mr. Riddle. I wish the others at this table shared your common sense.”

My chest swells with pride, but I keep my face collected.

“Now, let’s talk strategy,” Bellatrix says cheerfully.

Part One

#harry potter smut #tom riddle #theodore nott #draco malfoy smut #regulus black #dark romance

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vampiricnonsense · 2 years ago

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i see a lot of object show fans talking about the twitter war between enstarries and i’d like to clear things up because it’s really getting on my nerves how people are saying stuff like i was attacking a community of autistic people. i’m literally autistic myself it’s just ridiculous.

rest under a read more because there’s a lot of sensitive stuff

first off i don’t hate object shows because of the poll, the poll just revived my hatred. i’ve always hated object shows, i don’t have a reason and i don’t need one.

when i said i hated object shows i immediately started getting attacked for it, i thought it was funny so i played along and baited them a little. i made a tweet saying that if you didn’t like my hate of object shows you should block me, it’s as simple as that. this pissed them off because i started getting some absolutely vile curiouscat anon messages.

before i continue, content warnings for sexual harassment, death threats, suicide baiting, rape, and misgendering

here’s some of the things object show fans sent me, note that i had deleted the worst of the messages so i don’t have screenshots of those. there’s also a theme of people calling me a white woman, i am a mixed transgender man which is important to note, they were denying my identity as a form of hate.

again because i deleted a lot of stuff i don’t have screenshots but i also received quite a few variations of “kill yourself” and “being transgender is a mental illness” along with misgendering

some of my mutuals tried to defend me, unfortunately they received rape threats for doing so, here’s some of the messages they received

there’s more but i can only add so many images, multiple mutuals received messages like this from object show fans.

not only did i receive tons of harassment but people were defending me being harassed just because i made fun of something they likes

so before y’all come on hear painting me and the whole enstars fandom as villains remember what your fandom did to me and my mutuals. these anons may not have gotten to me but they certainly got to my mutuals. be ashamed of yourselves for once.

#enstars #inanimate insanity #object shows

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girl8890 · 3 years ago

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♦️♠️♥️♣️♦️♠️♥️♣️

Started: 09/20/2021

Last Updated: 10/04/2022

Total Works: 19

♣️♥️♠️♦️♣️♥️♠️♦️

Ⓡⓔⓠⓤⓔⓢⓣⓢ: CLOSED

Request Guide Lines

Rating System

♦️♠️♥️♣️♦️♠️♥️♣️

Key:

💦 = Smut , 🐑 = Fluff , 👊 = Angst ,

💜 = Personal favorite , 💋 = Popular , ✨ = New ,

✔️ = Completed , ✍🏼 = Work in progress ,

❌ = Hiatus

♣️♥️♠️♦️♣️♥️♠️♦️

Other content involving AIB:

100 Follower Special ~ What Your Personality Says Your Speciality is

。・°°・°°・。。・°°・°°・。。・°°・°°・。

Niragi Suguru ♦️

Yes, I know his name is backwards.

𝕊𝕥𝕠𝕣𝕚��𝕤

Personal Ballerina: Index 💦👊✔️18+

Summary: Niragi’s life was going great. He was the second in command militant and had so much power over everyone around him. He didn’t have to worry about anyone from his past, or anyone finding out about his past. Until, another group formed in Borderland. One person apart of that group, used to be his own personal ballerina.

Warnings: Spoilers for manga & show, Mentions of Bullying, Mentions of Abuse, Violence, Death Threats, Background character death, Suicidal thoughts, Angst, Eventual Smut, Vaginal sex, Loss of Virginity.

𝕆𝕟𝕖 𝕊𝕙𝕠𝕥𝕤

How it All Started 🐑👊💋V

- > Summary: What’s it like dating Niragi? It’s quite literally like a rollercoaster. One second he’ll be all sweet and cuddly with you, the next he’ll be pinning you against the wall and hate fucking you. There’s never a in between. This includes, how you got together, but how exactly did you two meet?

- > Warnings: Angst.

𝕏𝕏

First Time, While in Love 💦🐑💜18+

- > Summary: What was it like to sleep with Niragi for the first time? Well, your not a stranger or a casual fuck. Your his girlfriend. His first girlfriend, and his first love. And, no one would believe you if you told them the truth about it…

- > Warnings: Smut, Oral (f receiving), Vaginal Sex.

𝕏𝕏

Don’t Care 👊💋 V

- > Summary: You catch the eye of the infamous Niragi Suguru. He’s ruthless and mean, but he for some reason won’t stop bothering you. You won’t sugar coat it, he scares the living shit out of you. It’s not until you’re forced into a corner by the mad man himself, that you have to face these fears.

- > Warnings: Mentions of Rape and Torture.

ℍ𝕖𝕒𝕕-ℂ𝕒𝕟𝕠𝕟𝕤

How He Would React if He Saw You Cry🐑👊💋T

What Would He Do If You Had a Crush on Someone 👊💋V

NSFW Alphabet 💦18+

。・°°・°°・。。・°°・°°・。。・°°・°°・。

Chishiya Shuntaro ♦️

Yes, I know his name is backwards.

𝕊𝕥𝕠𝕣𝕚𝕖𝕤

Smile With Teeth: Index 💦🐑💜💋✔️18+

Summary: Chishiya hated his life before the Borderlands. He hated everything about it and he felt that it wasn’t satisfactory. Nothing was keeping him going, except you. You, his fiancé, are the only thing that’s keeping him going. Both to stay living, and to get out of the Borderlands. He did some pretty messed up things to try to get back to you. Only to find out, you were in Borderlands all along.

Warnings: Spoilers for the manga & show, Attempt at rape, Talks about bullying, Mild violence, Minor character death, Eventual Smut, Vaginal Sex.

𝕆𝕟𝕖 𝕊𝕙𝕠𝕥𝕤

Needing You 🐑👊 V

-> Summary: After meeting you and escaping borderlands, Chishiya thought that the nightmare of a life he was living was over. But the nightmare of almost seeing you die during a game still follows him. He’s always put up a front as being a strong person, but after this last nightmare he can’t help himself and carry out the need to hold you close and cry in your arms.

-> Warnings: nightmares, fluff, angst, post borderlands, nightmares, murder, blood, crying Chishiya, cuddling, neglectful parents, familial pressure, one kiss

Fight or Flight 👊💜18+

- > Summary: Chishiya and you are dating in secret. It was all working out fine until Niragi started having an interest for you. Chishiya walks into a room where you and Niragi are alone. You both know what Niragi is trying to do to you, but will Chishiya stop him or walk away to keep his biggest weakness of loving you a secret?

- > Warnings: Sexual Assault, Angst.

𝕏𝕏

Jealous Mess 💦👊💜💋18+

- > Summary: You and Chishiya are dating and most of the people at The Beach know about it. The people who don’t, are the new comers. One new comer in particular, doesn’t seem to get the hint that your taken. Since your so blind to the new guys advances, you just think he’s being friendly and you become friends with him. Chishiya on the other hand, looks at this situation as one that could take you away from him.

- > Warnings: Emotional Smut, Vaginal Sex, Jealousy, and Spoilers For The Manga.

𝕏𝕏

Before it All Fell Apart 💦🐑👊✨18+

-> Summary: Prologue to Smile with Teeth. Basically, everything that happened before Chishiya or his fiancé went into the Borderlands. Chishiya’s loss of virginity, the proposal, the actually sending into Borderlands. All in this one shot… it’s - it’s a lot.

-> Warnings: Insecurities, Smut, Oral (m), Fingering, Loss of virginity (m), Vaginal sex, Unprotected sex (wrap it up kids!), Fluff, Proposals, Angst, Mentions of death.

𝕏𝕏

Run Away Affection 🐑 T

-> Summary: Chishiya has been running away from your affection as soon as they started. You don’t understand why, since you’ve come from a family that loves giving physical affection whenever possible. When you kiss him on the cheek because he defend you, he runs away once again. But this time, enough is enough. Your want answers, and it’s time for him to give you them.

-> Warnings: Insecurities, Cursing, First kiss.

ℍ𝕖𝕒𝕕-ℂ𝕒𝕟𝕠𝕟𝕤

How He Would React if He Saw You Cry🐑👊💋T

What Would He Do If You Had a Crush on Someone 👊💋V

NSFW Alphabet 💦18+

。・°°・°°・。。・°°・°°・。。・°°・°°・。

Takatora Samura / Last Boss ♠️

𝕆𝕟𝕖 𝕊𝕙𝕠𝕥𝕤

Forever? V 👊💜

- > Summary: You and Takatora, Last Boss, have been dating for awhile. You and the Borderlands are the only things that make him feel alive. Even after all this time you’ve spent together, you never talked about you leaving Borderland if you had the chance. He’s finally found out, but he’s not taking it so well.

- > Warnings: Mentions of past sexual encounters, Violence, Angst.

𝕏𝕏

Alone Time 18+ 💦🐑💜

- > Summary: You and Last Boss have an odd friendship. You’re the most innocent person that’s ever joined The Beach, and he’s considered the most scariest looking man that’s ever been put into Borderland. He saw you everyday, like a little daily meet up, until one day… he stops. He leaves every room you enter, and gets flushed every time he catches you staring at him. You don’t understand why he’s ignoring you until you catch him doing - err - alone time?

- > Warnings: Masturbation (m).

ℍ𝕖𝕒𝕕-ℂ𝕒𝕟𝕠𝕟𝕤

What Would He Do If You Had a Crush on Someone 👊💋V

NSFW Alphabet 💦18+

。・°°・°°・。。・°°・°°・。。・°°・°°・。

Mira Kanō ♥️

ℍ𝕖𝕒𝕕-ℂ𝕒𝕟𝕠𝕟𝕤

Realizing She’s in Love With You 🐑💜 T

NSFW Alphabet 💦 18+

。・°°・°°・。。・°°・°°・。。・°°・°°・。

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sleep-deprivedracoon · 3 years ago

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Tell it to my heart

Here's to the one with the scorching stare of love, blood, and vengeance. Eyes killer cold, blue and bare.

pairing: Gojo Satoru x f! reader AU - Mafia

warnings: angst, implied abuse, injuries, blood, alcohol, death, suicide, drug usage, addict, recovery, smut, gore, violence, trauma, guns, abuse, sex, overstimulation, rape threats, murder

Author’s note: This fanfiction is going to be a slow build story with an irregular upload scheme. I am not sure when I will be able to update. I might upload multiple chapters in a single week or not upload for a few weeks. It depends on what my daily schedule is, and it is very dynamic. This story is for a mature audience and will have a lot of problematic themes. If this is triggering to you, please refrain from interacting with this story. The content warning is for the entire story and not just for this chapter. Again, I cannot emphasize enough, this is a slow burn story. In this story, you will find some changes in mannerisms among characters. Gojo Satoru will be smoking and drinking. Yuji and Sukuna will be 2 different people but are related by blood. The main reason is, I do not see Yuji being part of a Mafia unless he had no other choice. The cursed spirits will be human in appearance.

<< Previous chapter | CHAPTER LIST | Next Chapter >>

Chapter 11 - Alone

Bloodshot eyes looked back at you as you stared at your reflection in the airplane’s window. Tears just did not seem to stop flowing from your eyes. You sat all by yourself in the back of the plane away from everyone. How many people would you have to witness dying in your life? Your father at the ER, your mother from the ceiling, Yuji’s grandfather, Asami, Shin, and God knows how many more. Asami and Shin had it coming but that didn’t make it okay. Moreover, the comfort that you’d been getting with the triad seemed like a farce to you now.

“(Y/N) …? (Y/N) …” You felt a hand on your shoulder, and you flinch. You look up to see Yuji. You wipe your tears and sniffle.

“(Y/N) … Can I talk to you?” You look at his hand placed on your shoulder. Bruises covered his knuckles.

“Sure… Um... Yuji, your hand… it looks painful.” You hold his hand in yours as he takes a seat.

“Ah… I am alright, (Y/N).” He reassures you.

“I am sorry, Yuji. I put you in danger.” You whisper.

“Stop. You were in danger. I chose to protect you. It wasn’t your fault. I’d do it again 100 times if I have to.” He clenched his fist. “Seeing him hurt you like that? I couldn’t take it.”

“Yuji…”

“Sukuna told me what happened.” Yuji looked out the window beside you. “I don’t know how to feel about it. On one hand, I know that taking someone’s life is wrong but when someone I love is in danger, I don’t think I would be able to hold myself back.”

“I know what you mean. I am not sure how to feel about it myself as well.”

“Are you happy here, (Y/N)?” Yuji looks directly at you.

“What do you mean?” Were you happy? You would like to think so. Happiness was a fickle state of mind for you. Right now, you were far from happy.

“With this arrangement. You’re agreeing to all of this to protect me, aren’t you?” He sighs.

“Yuji, Sukuna is your brother. With or without me, you would be protected.” You chuckle dryly.

“I know. But you’re here because you promised gramps to look after me. Is that why you’re sleeping with Gojo as well? To ensure that we stay here? You don’t have to do that. I can protect the both of us.” He places a hand on top of your head.

“I am not sleeping with Gojo for favors.” You explain. “Is that what everyone is thinking?? It was my choice. I wasn’t coerced into anything. I want to stay here so that you get to spend time with your family and to ensure both of our safety. You saw what the SnK are capable of.”

“Do you like him then? Gojo, I mean.” Yuji raises an eyebrow.

“I don’t know. It is confusing.” You mumble.

“Does he like you?” He asks

“I don’t think so. This is supposed to be a no strings attached situation.” You doubted that Gojo felt anything for you except the feeling of acquaintanceship. He made it pretty clear a few hours ago that there was no correlation between the two of you and his decisions. It stung but it was something that you knew was bound to happen.

“I see. I don’t know what to say. But please, put yourself first. You don’t have to worry about me.” He grins as he ruffles your hair and gets up from his seat. “Also, I am here for you if you need me.” He smiles softly as he leaves you to be by yourself.

How was this kid always so kind to everyone? You wondered. He went through losing everything like you did but yet he could smile and be there for those who needed him. You wished you were as strong as he was.

What did you feel for Gojo? You didn’t know but what you did know was the fact that you had to end whatever it was between the two of you. Despite seeing his cruel side, you knew that you could forgive him for it which was alarming to you. Morally, everything Gojo was involved in was in the wrong. But yet, your heart yearned for his company.

The plane slowly began to descend, and you peak out of the window to see cars waiting for you to get back home. You didn’t share a car with Gojo while going to the airport in Melbourne. You couldn’t help but wonder if that would be the case even now. If the two of you were going to share a car, you had decided to end things with him. It would make it easier for you to not like him and not approve of his problematic behavior.

You receive an all-clear message from the pilot to disembark from the plane. You remove your seatbelt and grab your carry-on bag. You patiently wait for everyone to exit as you stand on the aisle. Your eyes briefly meet his as he gets off the plane. You look away instantly to avoid him. Once everyone was out, you get off the plane.

“Hello, (y/n).” Nanami adjusts his glasses as he addresses you.

“Hi.” You fake a smile.

“You’ll be traveling with me. There’s been a small change in all our routes.” He leads you to the car you were supposed to travel in.

“Is it because our safety has been compromised?” You ask him.

“Yes. Not that anything should happen, it is just a precaution.” He smiles.

You enter the car and sit in the front with Nanami while his men load your bags into the car.

“I know what happened is a lot to process. I assume you see us in a different light now?” He looks at the rearview mirror for a signal to leave.

“It has been difficult, I am not going to lie. Gojo just shot a man as if it wasn’t a big deal.”

“Hmm... Understandable.” Nanami starts the car and drives. “Seeing that isn’t something you can forget…. But doing the act itself is also something one never forgets.” He looks at you. “We’re not mindless killers, (Y/N). If we can avoid it, we avoid it as much as we can. Gojo has always played the role of a protector. If his family is in danger, it is natural to eliminate the threat.”

“I am not family… I am just a pawn in this game.” You look away from Nanami and out of the window.

“You really think that?” Nanami chuckled.

“Yeah…” You mumble.

Nanami doesn’t respond. The ride was mostly silent. The route you took was longer than usual and you were stuck in traffic when Nanami’s phone rang.

“Hello. Nanami here.” He answers the phone. “WHAT?” You see him grip the phone tighter. “FUCK. Where are they now? We’ll be on our way!”

“Nanami?” You see him clench the steering wheel tightly.

“Gojo… he’s hurt.” He grits his teeth. “How?? What happened?” You lean forward in your seat. “Where is he now?”

“He’s in a critical condition. I don’t know the details. His car was in an explosion. They’ve managed to get him to the hospital. We’re going there now.”

“Of course. What about the rest of them? Utahime and Sukuna’s cars?” You were scared about them. Did they make it out okay? They also took different routes.

“I need to find out.” He starts dialing a number. “Sukuna… yes, I heard. Yes, I am on my way. How’s everything on your side…. Oh... Oh fuck… that’s not good… Yes, she is here… We’re okay… We’ll be careful.” He hangs up.

“Are they okay?” Your hands tremble.

“Mostly, yes. They lost 2 men. They came under heavy firing.” Nanami pinches the bridge of his nose. “Utahime is unreachable at the moment. We need to be careful. They knew our plans. Continuing on this planned route would lead us to a trap for sure.”

“Fuck.” You pick up your phone and start dialing Utahime’s number. The phone goes unanswered.

“Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to park this car and take a cab to the hospital. This car is like a moving target at this point.” Nanami drives ahead and parks the car on the side of the road. He gets off the car and you follow suite. The men seated in the backseat also get off the car.

Nanami fidgets with his phone to book two cabs. “Be by her side at all costs. Our priority is that (Y/N) stays safe, got it.”

“Yes, sir!” The two men respond in unison.

You look around, trying to gauge the environment. Everyone looked suspicious. Who was innocent, who was a threat, it was difficult to make that assessment? You hear gunshots and you feel your body being pulled back by one of the men. The four of you rush to take cover in an alleyway.

“Shoot. They’ve spotted us.” Nanami pulls out a pistol from his pockets. You notice blood staining his pant, spreading.

“Nanami, you’ve been shot.” Your eyes widen.

“It’s fine.” He grunts. “We need to get out of here. We can worry about everything later.” He pulls out another pistol and hands it to you. “Keep this on you. You might have to use it to protect yourself.”

Your trembling hands take the pistol. What was happening? You’re pulled up and your group tries to make it to the other side of the alleyway. As you reach closer to the exit, you hear more gunshots go off from both sides, yours and theirs. You were placed right in between the three men who were protecting you from the crossfire.

“They just never give up, do they…?” Nanami pants. He was sweating and pale. You were worried for him.

“Nanami, you need help. You’re losing too much blood.” You grab him by the jacket.

“I am fine…” He nods. Before you could respond to him, you two see blood stains appearing on his chest. He lurches forward from being shot. You hold on to him, as you feel the hot liquid on you.

“(Y/N) … Run… Take her away…” He struggles to speak.

“Na-Nanam- No…. We can’t leave him!!” You struggle as his men pull you away from him. Covered in his blood, you stare in horror as he collapses to the ground. At the other end of the alley, you see a familiar figure. The same sinister figure that haunted your nightmares. Mahito.

One of the men picks you off your feet, over his shoulders, and runs. “We can’t leave him behind.” You struggle against the man.

“His orders were clear. Protecting you is the top priority.” He stops a car. The second man throws the driver out of the car and they push you in. They drive as fast as they can away from the scene. You crouch in the backseat, smeared in Nanami’s blood, wondering if it would all have been better if you were killed beside Asami.

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

It looked like he was asleep. You wanted to believe he was asleep. You stared at Gojo’s limp body on the hospital bed. There were a lot of devices connected to him, beeping simultaneously.

“Wake up.” You mumbled. “Please, wake up.”

You got no response. It had been a week since the incident. Nanami was gone. It was your fault that he was gone. He died protecting you. There wasn’t even a proper burial or funeral for him. His body was burnt to a crisp at the same spot that you had left him. It was Mahito’s MO.

Gojo on the other hand sustained severe injuries to his head. The idiot decided to stop at Shibuya instead of coming home. The car beside his had detonative explosives and he was caught in the explosion. It was his luck that he sat on the opposite end of the blast which is why he was still alive but gravely injured. He was in an artificially induced Coma and awaited multiple surgeries. With Nanami gone and Gojo in the hospital, the triad was in chaos. Nobody could trace Utahime. Her convoy had gone missing without any traces.

Every day, you went to the hospital to check on Gojo. You spoke to him, you cried to him. You never got a response. You didn’t know when you would.

“Please… you need to wake up… you need to wake up and punish me.” You cried. “Nanami is dead because of me… are you not going to take revenge for your friend?”

All you heard was the beeping of the medical devices.

“You need to get better, you hear me. They need you… I – I need you. I don’t know what to do, Satoru.”

You sat there for a long time, your eyes puffy and red from all the tears until the nurse informs you that it was past visiting hours. You pick up your belongings and head to the ladies restroom. You splash your face with cold water. You looked like a mess. A broken mess. You wipe your face with tissues and stuff a handful of tissues in your bag. You leave the restroom and were stopped by an unfamiliar face.

“(Y/N)?”

“Yes?” You were wary of this stranger. He seemed too confident with himself.

“Zenin. Naoya Zenin. I would say it is a pleasure to meet you. But it isn’t.” He scowled.

You remained silent. How does one respond to that?

“We need to talk. Come with me.” He orders.

“I am not going anywhere. We can talk here just fine.” You cross your arms.

“Fine. I am not the one to beat around the bush. Do you know where Utahime Iori is?”

“She’s missing…” You whisper.

“Wrong. Is that what Sukuna and Shoko are telling you? Hehe. Idiots. The triad is already weak without Nanami and Gojo. Nobody can think straight it seems.” He smirks. “She is being held hostage by Geto and guess what they want in exchange for her?”

You did not have to think hard for this one. “Me.”

“Right. Now I am going to be honest with you. We need Utahime more than we need you. We’re weak. Sukuna is all brawn and is emotionally unstable after Shibuya. You’re practically worthless to us. Without Gojo, I don’t even think we need you anymore. However, if you do agree to trade places with Utahime, the triad will be stable. The people you care about will be better protected.” He glared at you. “Honestly, if I had it my way, I wouldn’t even wait for an answer. But I do not want to cause a rift in the triad now. We can’t afford that.”

You close your eyes and take a deep breath. “Fine. I’ll do it.” You exhale.

“At least you are smart.” He scoffs.

“But I have one condition.” You narrow your eyes.

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

She stood there with tears in her eyes, her mouth gagged by tape and her hair was disheveled. But she looked unharmed. You stood beside Naoya and his entourage of men. Utahime’s eyes met yours and you try to smile. She was going to be okay. No one else needed to get hurt at your expense.

“Hand her over,” Naoya growls.

“Certainly,” Geto smirks and nods at his man to let her go. Utahime swiftly walks towards your group with her hands tied to her back.

Your mouth was dry as you try to swallow down your fear. This was it. The end of the road for you.

“Now, (Y/N) … Why don’t you come towards us?” Geto grins.

You slowly take small steps towards your impending doom. You could feel your ears ringing due to the sound of your heartbeat. You stop halfway and you look at Mahito. He waves at you. Your fear was instantly replaced by rage. This man… No… This monster had killed Asami. This monster had killed Nanami. You pull out a gun from your pocket and pull the trigger.

Nothing happens. Your eyes widen as you look at the gun in your hand. Did you do something wrong? You check the gun and find that it wasn’t loaded. You turn around and look at the man who agreed to give the gun to you.

Naoya laughs. “You really thought I would jeopardize this because you wanted to get revenge? I owe you nothing, (Y/N). All of this was on you. You did this to us and now you face the consequences.” He tugs Utahime and pushes her into his car.

Defeated, you drop the gun and fall to your knees. You hear the sound of the cars driving away. This was it.

“Oh poor (Y/N).” Geto crouches in front of you. “Betrayed by her so-called family.” He grabs your chin in his hand. “Didn’t I tell you that you couldn’t trust them? Look where it got you. So much pain and heartbreaks.”

“Kill me already.” You whimper.

“Oh no. I think you have something I need.” He grins. “Something that your friend, Miss Saito left.”

“I know nothing. She didn’t tell me anything.” You grit your teeth.

“Hmm… See, what I need is a password. I am sure that wench slipped it in some form or other. You’re the only person she contacted.” He pulls your face towards him. “So, tell me exactly what happened that night.”

A lightbulb switches in your brain as you connect the dots. A password. Your try to recall what Asami said. She was overly fixated on getting weed. As a junkie on withdrawal, she wouldn’t mind anything as a quick fix, but she was very upset about you not getting her favorite strain – Strawberry Haze. It dawned on you that there was more to it than a hysterical withdrawal tantrum. What was this password for? If Geto wants it really bad, then you were better off not telling it to him to protect the triad.

“She texted me saying she wanted to meet me. She wanted weed. It had been long since we met because she went off the radar after she got addicted to drugs.” You ramble. “We met at the back alley of the club we used to work at. I had the weed, but she was acting paranoid and I was reluctant to give it to her. She started freaking out and that is when he showed up.” You tilt your head in Mahito’s direction. “He killed her. The end.”

“Hmm…” Geto lets go of your face. “You see, (Y/N) … I can’t help but feel that something is amiss. I am very good at reading people.” He grins sinisterly. “If you aren’t being cooperative, then I’ll have to use other means.”

“I swear, I am telling you the truth.” You plead. Geto clicks his tongue and looks at Mahito. “Tie her up and bring her along. No killing.”

“If you say so.” Mahito and a few men surround you. You feel yourself being pulled up. Your hands are handcuffed at the back. Your legs are tied, and your mouth gagged. Before you could breathe, you feel a sharp prick in your arm. You feel woozy as everything around you starts to spin. You blink fast, trying to adjust your vision but it is of no use. You slowly lose sensation in your limbs, and you feel yourself collapsing to the floor. You close your eyes as you brace yourself for impact as you slowly fade out.

Taglist - @yenluvr @brumous11

#gojo jjk #gojo satoru #gojo satoru x reader #gojo sensei #gojo x reader #jjk fanfic #gojo satoru smut #gojo smut #jjk smut #nanami kento #jjk angst #satoru gojo #gojo fanfic #gojo saturo #gojo satoru fanfic #gojo angst #ryomen sukuna #yuji itadori

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innuendostudios · 3 years ago

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I was invited to give a talk on GamerGate over Zoom in early 2021. I've long been frustrated that there isn't a good timeline of GG and its origins on YouTube. When people ask "what the hell was GG anyway?" they often get referred to my or Dan Olson's videos on the subject, but both of them were made while GG was ongoing, and presumed a degree of familiarity on the part of the audience. There was just too much to say about what was already happening to spend time getting the audience up to speed, and it was safe to assume our audiences had enough context to follow along. But time moves fast on the internet, and many people who now care about such things weren't there while it was happening, and are lacking the necessary context to follow the better videos. For a long time, I've only been able to direct them to RationalWiki's timeline, which is excellent but so exhaustively comprehensive that it's likely to scare off first-timers.

I realize an hourlong lecture isn't necessarily helping matters, but the first 20-or-so minutes of this video are my attempt at streamlining the timeline such that people can be up to speed on the most important stuff fairly quickly. The rest is talking about what it all meant, how it prefigured the Alt-Right, and using it to better understand digital radicalization.

This video was made with the help of Magdalen Rose, who edited the slides to the audio while I was laid up with a back injury. Go sub to her channel! And please back me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

FUCKING VIDEO GAMES? FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THEY MADE DOZENS OF PEOPLE MISERABLE FOR YEARS OVER VIDEO GAMES! NOT EVEN FUCKING VIDEO GAMES, FUCKING ARTICLES ABOUT FUCKING VIDEO GAMES. THIS IS WHAT PASSES FOR LEGITIMATE GRIEVANCE. ARE YOU KIDDING ME WITH THIS SHIT??

Hi! My name is Ian Danskin. I’m a video essayist and media artist. I run the YouTube channel Innuendo Studios, please like share and subscribe.

I’m here to talk to you about GamerGate, and I needed to get all that out of the way. I’m going to talk about what GamerGate was and how it prefigured The Alt-Right, and there are gonna be moments where you’re nodding along with me, going, “yeah, yeah I get it,” and then the sun’s gonna break through a crack in the wall and you’ll suddenly remember that all this is happening because some folks - mostly ladies - said some stuff - provably true stuff, I might add - about video games and a bunch of guys didn’t like it, and you’re gonna want to rip your hair out. By the end of this, you will have a better understanding of what happened, but it will never not be bullshit.

Also, oh my god, content warning. Racism, sexism, antisemitism, homophobia, transphobia, rape threats, threats of violence, domestic abuse - I’m not going to depict or describe at length any of the worst stuff, but it’s all in the mix. So if at any point you need to switch me off or mute me, you have my blessing.

Brace yourselves.

Some quick prehistory:

In 2012, feminist media critic Anita Sarkeesian ran a Kickstarter campaign for a YouTube series on sexist tropes in video games. And, partway through the campaign, 4chan found it and said “let’s ruin her life.” And a lot of the male general gaming public joined in. And by “ruin her life” I’m not talking 150 angry tweets including dozens of rape and death threats per week, though that was a thing. I’m talking bomb threats. I’m talking canceled speaking engagements because someone threatened to shoot up a school. I’m talking FBI investigation. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

And in 2013, Zoe Quinn released Depression Quest, a free text game about living with depression. They received harassment off and on for the next year, most pointedly from an incel forum called Wizardchan that doxxed their phone number and made harassing phone calls telling them to kill themself. The harassers faced no meaningful repercussions.

(Also, quick note: Zoe Quinn is nonbinary and has come out since the events in question. When I call Zoe’s harassment misogynist, understand I am not calling Zoe a woman, but they were attacked by people who hate women because that’s how they were perceived. Had they been out at the time things probably would’ve gone down similarly, but on top of misogyny I’d be talking about nonbinary erasure and transphobia.)

Okay. Our story begins in August 2014. The August that never ended.

Depression Quest, after a prolonged period on Greenlight, finally releases on Steam as a free download with the option to pay what you want. In the days that follow, Zoe’s ex-boyfriend, Eron Gjoni, writes a nearly 10,000-word blog called The Zoe Post, in which he claims Quinn had been a shitty and unfaithful partner. (For reference, 10,000 words is long enough that the Hugos would consider it a novelette.) This is posted to forums on Penny Arcade and Something Awful, both of which immediately take it down, finding it, at best, a lot of toxic hearsay and, at worse, an invitation to harassment. So Gjoni workshops the post, adds a bunch of edgelord humor (and I am using the word “humor” very generously), and reposts it to three different subforums on 4chan.

We’re not going to litigate whether Zoe Quinn was a good partner. I don’t know or care. I don��t think anyone on this call is trying to date them so I’m not sure that’s our business. What is known is that the relationship lasted five months, and, after it ended, Gjoni began stalking Quinn. Gjoni has, in fact, laid out how he stalked Quinn in meticulous detail to interviewers and why he feels it was justified. It’s also been corroborated by a friend that Quinn briefly considered taking him back at a games conference in San Francisco, but he became violent during sex and Quinn left the apartment in the middle of the night with visible bruises.

Off of the abusive ex-boyfriend’s post, 4chan decides it’s going to make Zoe Quinn one of their next targets, and starts a private IRC channel to plan the campaign. The channel is called #BurgersAndFries, a reference to Gjoni claiming Quinn had cheated on him with five guys. A couple sentences in The Zoe Post - which Gjoni would later claim were a typo - imply that one of the five guys was games journalist Nathan Grayson and that Quinn had slept with him in exchange for a good review of Depression Quest. Given the anger that they’d seen drummed up against women in games with the previous Anita Sarkeesian hate mob, #BurgersAndFries decides to focus on this breach of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover story, many of them howling with laughter at the thought that male gamers would probably buy it. This way, destroying Quinn’s life and career and turning their community against them would appear an unfortunate byproduct of a legitimate consumer revolt; criticism of the harassment could even be framed as a distraction from the bigger issue. Gjoni himself is in the IRC channel telling them that this was the best hand to play.

The stated aim of many on #BurgersAndFries was to convince Quinn to commit suicide.

Two regulars in the IRC, YouTubers MundaneMatt and Internet Aristocrat, make videos about The Zoe Post. Incidentally, both these men had already made a lot of money off videos about Anita Sarkeesian. Matt’s is swiftly taken down with a DMCA claim, and he says that Quinn filed the claim themself. (For the record, in those days, YouTube didn’t tell you who filed DMCA claims against you.) Members of the IRC also reach out to YouTuber TotalBiscuit, who had been critical of Sarkeesian and dismissive of her harassment, and he tweets the story to his 350,000 followers, saying a game developer trading sex for a good review might not prove true, but was certainly plausible.

This is where GamerGate begins to get public traction.

Zoe Quinn is very swiftly doxxed, with their phone number, home address, nudes, and names and numbers of their family collected. Gjoni himself leaks their birth name. The Zoe Post, and the movement against Quinn - now dubbed “The Quinnspiracy” - make it to The Escapist and Reddit, which mods will have little luck removing. The Quinnspiracy declares war on any site that does take their threads down, most vehemently NeoGAF. People who defend Zoe against the harassment start getting doxxed themselves - Fez developer Phil Fish is doxxed so thoroughly, hackers get access to the root folder of his website.

In what I’m going to call This Should Have Been The End, Part 1, Stephen Totilo, Editor-in-Chief at Kotaku where Nathan Grayson worked, in response to pressure not just from The Quinnspiracy but an increasing number of angry gamers buying The Quinnspiracy’s narrative, publishes a story. In it he verifies that Quinn and Grayson did date for several months, and that not only is there no review of Depression Quest anywhere on Kotaku, not by Grayson nor anyone else, but that Grayson did not write a single word about Quinn the entire time they were dating.

In response, The Quinnspiracy declares war on Kotaku. r/KotakuinAction is formed, which will become the primary site of organization outside of chanboards. The fact that their entire “movement” is based on a review that does not exist changes next to nothing.

Some people start to see The Quinnspiracy as potentially profitable. The Fine Young Capitalists get involved, a group ostensibly working to get women into video games but who have a Byzantine plan to do so wherein they crowdfund the budget and the woman who wins a competition gets to storyboard a game, but another company will make and she will get 8% of the profits, the rest going to a charity chosen by the top donor. 4chan becomes the top donor. They like TFYC because the head of the company has a vendetta against Zoe Quinn, who had previously called them out for their transphobic submission policy, and he falsely accused Quinn of having once doxxed him. 4chan feels backing an ostensibly feminist effort will be good PR, but can’t resist selecting a colon cancer charity because, they say, feminism is cancer and they want to be the cure to butthurt. They also get to design a character for the game, and so they create Vivian James, who will become the GamerGate mascot.

Manosphere YouTubers Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini launch a Patreon campaign for their antifeminist documentary The Sarkeesian Effect and come to The Quinnspiracy looking for $15,000 a month for an indefinite period to make it, which they get.

In what will prove genuinely awful timing, Anita Sarkeesian releases the second episode of Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, and, despite not being a games journalist and having nothing to do with Quinn or Grayson, she is immediately roped into the narrative about how feminists are ruining games culture and becomes the second major target of harassment. Both she and Quinn soon have to leave their houses after having receiving dozens and dozens of death threats that include their home addresses.

After being courted by members of the IRC channel, Firefly star Adam Baldwin tweets a link to one of the Quinnspiracy videos and coins the hashtag #GamerGate. This is swiftly adopted by all involved.

In response to all this, Leigh Alexander writes a piece for Gamasutra arguing that the identity that these men are flocking to the “ethics in games journalism” narrative to defend no longer matters as a marketing demographic. Gaming and games culture is so large and so varied, and the “core gamer” audience of 18-34 white bros growing smaller and septic, that there was no reason, neither morally nor financially, to treat them as the primary audience anymore. Love of gaming is eternal, but, she declared, “gamers,” as an identity, “are over.” Eight more articles contextualizing GamerGate alongside misogyny and the gatekeeping of games culture come out across several websites in the following days. GamerGate frames these as a clear sign of [deep sigh] collusion to oppress gamers, proving that ethics in games journalism is, indeed, broken, and Leigh Alexander becomes the third major target of harassment. These become known as the “gamers are dead” articles - a phrase not one of them uses - and they make “get Leigh Alexander fired from Gamasutra” one of their primary goals.

Something I need you to understand is that it has, at this point, been two weeks.

Highlights from the next little bit: Alex Macris, a higher up at The Escapist’s parent company, expresses support for GamerGate; he will go on to write the first positive coverage at a major publication and cement The Escapist as GamerGate-friendly. Mike Cernovich, aka “Based Lawyer,” gets GamerGate’s attention by mocking Anita Sarkeesian; he will go on to hire a private investigator to stalk Zoe Quinn. GamerGate launches Operation Disrespectful Nod, an email campaign pressuring companies to pull advertising from websites that have criticized them. They leverage their POC members, getting them, any time someone points out the rampant racism and antisemitism among GamerGaters, to say “I am a person of color and I am #NotYourShield”; most of these “POC members” are fake accounts left over from a previous, racist disinformation campaign. Milo Yiannapoulos gets involved, writing positive coverage of GG despite having mocked gamers for precisely this behavior in the past, and gets so much traffic it pulls Breitbart News out of obscurity and makes it a significant player in modern conservative news media.

[Hey! Ian from the future here. This talk mostly addresses how GamerGate prefigured the Alt-Right strategically and philosophically, but if you want a more explicit, material connection: Breitbart News took its newfound notoriety to become, as its Executive Chair phrased it in 2016, "a platform for the Alt-Right." That Executive Chair was Steve Bannon, who threw the website's weight behind The Future President Who Shall Not Be Named, and, upon getting his attention, would then go on to become his campaign strategist and work in his Administration. So, if you're wondering how one of the central figures of the Alt-Right ended up in the White House, the answer is literally "GamerGate." Back to you, Ian from the past!]

In what I’m calling This Should Have Been The End, Part 2, Zoe Quinn announces that they have been lurking the #BurgersAndFries IRC channel since the beginning and releases dozens of screenshots showing harassment being planned and the selection of “ethics in games journalism” as a cover. #BurgersAndFries has a meltdown, everyone turns on each other, and the channel is abandoned. And they then start another IRC and things proceed.

It goes on like this. I’m not gonna cover everything. This is just the first month. It should be clear by now that this thing is kind of unkillable. And I worry I haven’t made it obvious that this is not just a chanboard and an IRC. Thousands of regular, every day gamers were buying the story and joining in. They were angry, and no amount of evidence that their anger was unfounded was going to change that. You could not mention or even allude to GamerGate and not get flooded with dozens, even hundreds of furious replies. These replies always included the hashtag so everyone monitoring it could join in, so all attempts at real conversation devolved into a hundred forking threads where some people expected you to talk to them while others hurled insults and slurs. And always the possibility that, if any one of them didn’t like what you said, you’d be the next target.

To combat this, some progressives offered up the hashtag #GameEthics to the people getting swept up in GamerGate, saying, “look, we get that you’re angry, and if you want to talk about ethics in games journalism, we can totally do that, but using your hashtag is literally putting us in danger; they calling the police on people saying there’s a hostage situation at their home addresses so they get sent armed SWAT teams, and if you’ll just use this other hashtag we can have the conversation you say you want to have in safety.” And I will ever stop being salty about what happened.

They refused. They wouldn’t cede any ground to what they saw as their opposition. It was so important to have the conversation on their terms that not only did they refuse to use #GameEthics, they spammed it with furry porn so no one could use it.

A few major events on the timeline before we move on: Christina Hoff Sommers, the Republican Party’s resident “feminist,” comes out criticizing Anita Sarkeesian and becomes a major GG figurehead, earning the title Based Mom. Zoe Quinn gets a restraining order against Eron Gjoni, which he repeatedly violates, to no consequence; GG will later crowdfund his legal fees. There’s this listserv called GameJournoPros where game journalists would talk about their jobs, and many are discussing their concerns over GamerGate, so Milo Yiannopoulos leaks it and this is framed as further “proof of collusion.” 4chan finally starts enforcing its “no dox” rules and shuts GamerGate threads down, so they migrate to 8chan, a site famous for hosting like a lot of child porn. Indie game developer Brianna Wu makes a passing joke about GamerGate on Twitter and they decide, seemingly on a whim, to make her one of the biggest targets in the entire movement; she soon has to leave her home as well. GamerGate gets endorsements from WikiLeaks, Infowars, white nationalist sites Stormfront and The Daily Stormer, and professional rapist RooshV. And hundreds of people get doxxed; an 8chan subforum called Baphomet is created primarily to host dox of GamerGate’s critics.

But by November, GamerGate popularity was cresting, as more and more mainstream media covered it negatively. Their last, big spike in popularity came when Anita Sarkeesian went on The Colbert Report and Stephen made fun of the movement. Their numbers never recovered after that.

Which is not to say GamerGate ended. It slowed down. The period of confusion where the mainstream world couldn’t tell whether it was a legitimate movement or not passed. But, again, most harassers faced no meaningful repercussions. Gamers who bought the lie about “ethics in games journalism” stayed mad that no one had ever taken them seriously, and harassers continued to grief their targets for years. The full timeline of GamerGate is an constant cycle of lies, harassment, operations, grift, and doxxing. Dead-enders are to this day still using the hashtag. And remember how Anita had nothing to do with ethics in games journalism or Zoe Quinn, and they just roped her in because they’d enjoyed harassing her before so why not? Every one of GamerGate’s targets knows that they may get dragged into some future harassment campaign just because. It’s already happened to several of them. They’re marked.

(sigh) Let’s take a breath.

Now that we know what GamerGate was, let’s talk about why it worked.

In the thick of GamerGate, I started compiling a list of tactics I saw them using. I wanted to make a video essay that was one part discussion of antifeminist backlash, and one part list of techniques these people use so we can better recognize and anticipate their behavior. That first part became six parts and the second part went on a back burner. It would eventually become my series, The Alt-Right Playbook. GamerGate is illustrative because most of what would become The Alt-Right Playbook was in use.

Two foundational principles of The Alt-Right Playbook are Control the Conversation and Never Play Defense. Make sure people are talking about what you want them to talk about, and take an aggressive posture so you look dominant even when you’re not making sense. For instance: once Zoe leaked the IRC chatlogs, a reasonable person could tell the average gater, “the originators of GamerGate were planning harassment from the very beginning.” But the gater would say, “you’re cherry-picking; not everyone was a harasser.”

Now, this is a bad argument - that’s not how you use “cherry-picking” - and it’s being framed as an accusation - you’re not just wrong, you’re dishonest - which makes you wanna defend yourself. But, if you do - if you tell them why that argument is crap - you’ve let the conversation move from “did the IRC plan harassment?” - a question of fact - to “are the harassers representative of the movement?” - a question of ethics. Like, yes, they are, but only within a certain moral framework. An ethics question has no provable answer, especially if people are willing to make a lot of terrible arguments. It is their goal to move any question with a definitive answer to a question of philosophy, to turn an argument they can’t win into an argument nobody can win.

The trick is to treat the question you asked like it’s already been answered and bait you into addressing the next question. By arguing about whether you’re cherry-picking, you’re accepting the premise that whether you’re cherry-picking is even relevant. Any time this happens, it’s good to pause and ask, “what did we just skip over?” Because that will tell you a lot.

What you skipped over is their admission that, yes, the IRC did plan harassment, but that’s only on them if most of the movement was in on it. Which is a load of crap - the rest of the IRC saw it happening, let it happen, it’s not like anybody warned Zoe, and shit, I’m having the cherry-picking argument! They got me! You see how tempting it is? But presumably the reason you brought the harassment up is because you want them to do something about it. At the very least, leave the movement, but ideally try and stop it. They don’t, strictly speaking, need to feel personally responsible to do that. And you might be thinking, well, maybe if I can get them take responsibility then they’ll do something, but you’d be falling for a different technique I call I Hate Mondays.

This is where people will acknowledge a terrible thing is happening, maybe even agree it’s bad, but they don’t believe anything can be done about it. They also don’t believe you believe anything can be done about it. Mondays suck, but they come around every week. This is never stated outright, but it’s why you’re arguing past each other. To them, the only reason to talk about the bad thing is to assign blame. Whose turn is it to get shit on for the unsolvable problem? Their argument about cherry-picking amounts to “1-2-3 not it.” And they are furious with you for trying to make them responsible for harassment they didn’t participate in.

The unspoken argument is that harassment is part of being on the internet. Every public figure deals with it. This ignores any concept of scale - why does one person get harassed more than another? - but you can’t argue with someone who views it as a binary: harassment either happens or it doesn’t, and, if it does, it’s a fact of life, and, if it happens to everyone, it’s not gendered. And this is not a strongly-held belief they’ve come to after years of soul-searching - this is what they’ve just decided they believe. They want to participate in GamerGate despite knowing its purpose, and this is what would need to be true for that to be ok.

Or maybe they’re just fucking with you! Maybe you can’t tell. Maybe they can’t tell, either. I call this one The Card Says Moops, where people say whatever they feel will score points in an argument and are so irony-poisoned they have no idea whether they actually believe it. A very useful trick if the thing you appear to believe is unconscionable. You can’t take what people like that say at face value; you can only intuit their beliefs from their actions. They say they believe this one minute and that another, but their behavior is always in accordance with that, not this.

In the negative space, their belief is, “The harassment of these women is okay. My anger about video games is more important. I may not be harassing them myself, but they do kind of deserve it.” They will never say this out loud in a serious conversation, though many will say it in an anonymous or irreverent space where they can later deny they meant it. But, whatever they say they believe, this is the worldview they are operating under.

Obscuring this means flipping through a lot of contradictory arguments. The harassment is being faked, or it’s not being faked but it’s being exaggerated, or it’s not being exaggerated but the target is provoking it to get attention, which means GamerGate harassers simultaneously don’t exist, exist in small numbers, and exist in such large numbers someone can build a career out of relying on them! It can be kind of fun to take all these arguments made in isolation and try to string together an actual position. Like, GamerGate would argue that Nathan Grayson having previously mentioned Zoe Quinn in an article about a canceled reality show counts as positive coverage, and since Grayson reached out to Quinn for comment it’s reasonable to assume they started dating before the article was published (which is earlier than they claim), and positive coverage did lead to greater popularity for Depression Quest. But if you untangle that, it’s like… okay, you’re saying Zoe Quinn slept with a journalist in exchange for four nonconsecutive sentences that said no more than “Zoe Quinn exists and made a game,” and the price of those four sentences was to date the journalist for months, all to get rich off a game that didn’t cost any money. That’s your movement?

And some, if cornered, would say, “yes, we believe women are just that shitty, that one would fuck a guy for months if it made them the tiniest bit more famous.” But they won’t lead with that. Because they know it won’t convince the normies, even the ones who want to be convinced. So they use a process I call The Ship of Theseus to, piece by piece, turn that sentence into “slept with a journalist in exchange for a good review” and argue that each part of the sentence is technically accurate. It’s trying to lie without lying. And, provided all the pieces of this sentence are discussed separately, and only in the context of how they justify this sentence, you can trick yourself into believing this sentence is mostly true.

So, like, why? This is clearly motivated reasoning; what’s the motivation? What was this going to accomplish?

The answer is nothing. Nothing, by design. GamerGate’s “official” channels - the subreddit and the handful of forums that didn’t shut them down - were rigidly opposed to any action more organized than an email campaign. They had a tiny handful of tangible demands - they wanted gaming websites to post public ethics policies and had a list of people they wanted fired - but their larger aim was the sea change in how games journalism operated, which nothing they were asking for could possibly give them. The kind of anger that convinces you this is a true statement is not going to be addressed by a few paragraphs about ethics and Leigh Alexander getting a new job. They wanted gaming sites to stop catering to women and “SJWs” - who were a sizable and growing source of traffic - and to get out of the pockets of companies that advertised on their websites - which was their primary source of income. So all Kotaku had to do to make them happy was solve capitalism!

Meanwhile, the unofficial channels, like 8chan and Baphomet, were planning op after op to get private information, spread lies with fake accounts, get disinformation trending, make people quit jobs, cancel gigs, and flee their homes. Concrete goals with clear results. All you had to do to feel productive was go rogue. In my video,

How to Radicalize a Normie, I describe how the Alt-Right encourages lone wolf behavior by whipping people up into a rage and then refusing to give them anything to do, while surrounding them with examples of people taking matters into their own hands. The same mechanism is in play here: the public-facing channels don’t condone harassment but also refuse to fight it, the private channels commit it under cover of anonymity, and there is a free flow of traffic between them for when the official channels’ impotence becomes unbearable.

What I hope I’m illustrating is how these techniques play off of each other, how they create a closed ecosystem that rational thought cannot enter. There’s a phrase we use on the internet that got thrown around a lot at the time:

you can’t logic someone out of a position they didn’t logic themselves into.

Now, there are a few other big topics I think are relevant here, so I want to go through them one by one.

MEMEIFICATION

So a lot of interactions with GamerGate would involve a very insular knowledge base.

Like, you’d say something benign but progressive on Twitter.

A gater would show up in your mentions and say something aggressive and false.

You’d correct them. But then they’d come back and hit you with -

ah shit, sorry, this is a Loss meme.

If I were in front of a classroom I’d ask, show of hands, how many of you got that? I had to ask Twitter recently, does Gen Z know about Loss?!

If you don’t know what Loss is I’m not sure I can explain it to you. It’s this old, bad webcomic that was parodied so, so, so many times

that it was reduced to its barest essentials, to the point where any four panels with shapes in this arrangement is a Loss meme. For those of you in the know, you will recognize this anywhere, but have you ever tried to explain to someone who wasn’t in the know why this is really fuckin’ funny?

So, now… by the same process that this is a comics joke,

this is a rape joke.

I’m not gonna show the original image, but, once upon a time, someone made an animated GIF of the character Piccolo from Dragon Ball Z graphically raping Vegeta. 4chan loved it so much that it got posted daily, became known as the “daily dose,” until mods started deleting every incident of it. So they uploaded slightly edited version of it. Then they started uploading other images that had been edited with Piccolo’s color scheme. It got so abstracted that eventually any collection of purple and green pixels would be recognized as Piccolo Dick.

Apropos of nothing, GamerGate is a movement that insists it is not sexist in nature and it does not condone threats of rape against the women they don’t like. And this is their logo. This is their mascot.

If you’re familiar with the Daily Dose, the idea that GamerGate would never support Eron Gjoni if they believed he was a sexual abuser is so blatantly insincere it’s insulting… but imagine trying to explain to someone who’s not on 4chan how this sweater is a rape joke. Imagine having to explain it to a journalist. Imagine having to explain it to the judge enforcing your abuser’s restraining order.

Reactionaries use meme culture not just because they’re terminally online but also because it makes their behavior seem either benign or just confusing to outsiders. They find it hilarious that they can be really explicit and still fly under the radar. The Alt-Right did this with Pepe the Frog, the OK sign, even the milk glass emoji for a hot minute. The more inexplicable the meme, the better. You get the point where Stephen Miller is flashing Nazi signs from the White House and the Presidential re-eletion campaign is releasing 88 ads of exactly 14 words and there’s still a debate about whether the administration is racist. Because journalists aren’t going to get their heads around that. You tell them “1488 is a Nazi number,” it’s gonna seem a lot more plausible that you’re making shit up.

MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS

Online movements like GamerGate move at a speed and mutation rate too high for the mainstream world to keep up. And not just that they don’t understand the memes - they don’t understand the infrastructure.

In an attempt to cover GamerGate evenhandedly, George Wiedman of Super Bunnyhop interviewed a lawyer who specializes in journalistic ethics. He meant well; I really wish he hadn’t. You can see him trying to fit something like GamerGate into terms this silver-haired man who works in copyright law can understand. At one point he asks if it’s okay to fund the creative project of a potential journalistic source, to which the guy understandably says “no.”

What he’s alluding to here is the harassment of Jenn Frank. A few weeks into GamerGate, Jenn Frank writes a piece in The Guardian about sexism in tech that mentions Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn. In another case of “here’s a strongly-held belief I just decided I have,” GamerGate says this is a breach of journalistic ethics because Frank backs Quinn on Patreon. They harass her so intensely she not only has to quit her job at The Guardian, for several months she quits journalism entirely.

Off the bat, calling a public figure central to a major event in the field a “journalistic source” is flatly wrong-headed. Quinn was not interviewed or even contacted for the article, they were in no way a “source”; they were a subject. But I want to talk about this phrase, “fund a creative project.” Patreon is functionally a subscription; it’s a way of buying things. It’s technically accurate that Frank is funding Quinn’s creative project, but only in the sense that you are funding Bob Dylan’s creative project if you listen to his music. And saying Frank therefore can’t write about Quinn is like saying a music journalist can’t cover a Bob Dylan concert if they’ve ever bought his albums.

And we could talk about the ways that Patreon, as compared with other funding models, can create a greater sense of intimacy, and we also could comment that, well, that’s how an increasing number of people consume media now, so that perspective should be present in journalism. But maybe it means we should cover that perspective differently? I don’t know. It’s an interesting subject. But none of that’s going on in this conversation because this guy doesn’t know what Patreon is. It was only a year old at this point. Patreon’s been a primary source of my income for 5 years and my parents still don’t know what it is. (I think they think I’m a freelancer?) This guy hears “funding a creative project” and he’s thinking an investor, someone who makes a profit off the source’s success.

The language of straight society hasn’t caught up with what’s happening, and that works in GamerGate’s favor.

In the years since GamerGate we have dozens of stories of people trying to explain Twitter harassment to a legal system that’s never heard of Twitter. People trying to explain death threats to cops whose only relationship to the internet is checking email, confusedly asking, “Why don’t you just not go online?” Like, yeah, release your text game about depression at GameStop for the PS3 and get it reviewed in the Boston Globe, problem solved.

You see this in the slowness of mainstream journalists to condemn the harassment - hell, even games journalists at first. Because what if it is a legitimate movement? What if the harassers are just a fringe element? What if there was misconduct? The people in a position to stop GamerGate don’t have to be convinced of their legitimacy, they just have to hesitate. They just have to be unsure. Remember how much happened in just the first two weeks, how it took only a month to become unkillable.

It’s the same hesitance that makes mainstream media, online platforms, and law enforcement underestimate The Alt-Right. They’re terrified of condemning a group as white nationalist terrorists because they’re confused, and what if they’re wrong? Or, in most cases, not even afraid they’re wrong, but afraid of the PR disaster if too much of the world thinks they’re wrong.

ACCOUNTABILITY AND CONTROL

A thing I’ve talked about in The Alt-Right Playbook is how these decentralized, ostensibly leaderless movements insulate themselves from responsibility. Harassment is never the movement’s fault because they never told anyone to harass and you can’t prove the harassers are legitimate members of the movement. The Alt-Right does this too - one of their catchphrases is “I disavow.” Since there are no formalized rules for membership, they can redraw boundaries on the fly; they can take credit for any successes and deny responsibility for any wrongdoing. Public membership is granted or revoked based on a person’s moment-to-moment utility.

It’s almost like… they’re cherry-picking.

The flipside of this is a lack of control. Since they never officially tell anyone to do anything but write emails, they have no means of stopping anyone from behaving counterproductively. The harassment of Jenn Frank was the first time GamerGate’s originators thought, “maybe we should ease off just to avoid bad publicity,” and they found they couldn’t. GamerGate had gotten too big, and too many people were clearly there for precisely this reason.

They also couldn’t control the infighting. When your goal is to harass women and you have all these contradictory justifications for why, you end up with a lot of competing beliefs. And, you know what? Angry white men who like harassing people don’t form healthy relationships! Several prominent members of GamerGate - including Internet Aristocrat - got driven out by factionalism; they were doxxed by their own people! Jordan Owen and Davis Aurini parted ways hating each other, with Aurini releasing chatlogs of him gaslighting Owen about accepting an endorsement from Roosh, and they released two competing edits of The Sarkeesian Effect.

I say this because it’s useful to know that these are alliances of convenience. If you know where the sore spots are, you can apply pressure to them.

LEADERS WITHOUT LEADERSHIP

One way movements like GamerGate deflect responsibility is by declaring, “We are a leaderless movement! We have no means to stop harassment.”

Which… any anarchist will tell you collective action is entirely possible without leaders. But they’ll also tell you, absent a system of distributing power equitably, you’re gonna have leaders, just not ones you elected.

A few months into GamerGate, Randi Lee Harper created the ggautoblocker. Here’s what it did: it took five prominent GamerGate figures - Adam Baldwin, Mike Cernovich, Christina Hoff Sommers, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Nick Monroe, formerly known as [sigh] PressFartToContinue - and generated a block list of everyone who followed at least two of them on Twitter. Now, this became something of an arms race; once GamerGate found out about it they made secondary accounts that followed different people, and more and more prominent figures appeared and had to get added to the list. But, when it first launched, the list generated from just these five people comprised an estimated 90-95% of GamerGate.

Hate to break it to you, guys, but if 90+ percent of your movement is following at least two of the same five people, those are your leaders. The attention economy has produced them. Power pools when left on its own.

This is another case where you have to ignore what people claim and look at what they do. The Alt-Right loves to say “we disavow Richard Spencer” and “Andrew Anglin doesn’t speak for us.”

But no matter what they say, pay attention to whom they’re taking cues from.

AD CAMPAIGN

George Lakoff has observed that one way the Left fails in opposition to the Right is that most liberal politicians and campaigners have degrees in things like law and political science, where conservative campaigners more often have degrees in advertising and communications. Liberals and leftists may have a better product to sell, but conservatives know how to sell products.

GamerGate less resembles a boots-on-the-ground political movement than an ad campaign. First they decide what their messaging strategy is going to be. Then the media arm starts publicizing it. They seek out celebrity endorsements. They get their own hashtag and mascot. They donate to charity and literally call it “public relations.” You can even see the move from The Quinnspiracy to GamerGate as a rebranding effort - when one name got too closely associated with harassment, they started insisting GamerGate was an entirely separate movement from The Quinnspiracy. I learned that trick from Stringer Bell’s economics class.

Now, we could stand to learn a thing or two from this. But I also wouldn’t want us to adopt this strategy whole hog; you should view moves like these as red flags. If you’re hesitating to condemn a movement because what if it’s legitimate, take a look at whether they’re selling ideology like it’s Pepsi.

PERCEPTION IS EVERYTHING

One reason to insist you’re a consumer revolt rather than a harassment campaign is most people who want to harass need someone to give them permission, and need someone to tell them it’s normal.

Bob Altemeyer has this survey he uses to study authoritarianism. He divides respondents into people with low, average, and high authoritarian sentiments, and then tells them what the survey has measured and asks, “what score do you think is best to have: low, average, or high?”

People with low authoritarian sentiments say it’s best to be low. People with average authoritarian sentiments also say it’s best to be low. But people with high authoritarian sentiments? They say it’s best to be average. Altemeyer finds, across all his research, that reactionaries want to aggress, but only if it is socially acceptable. They want to know they are the in-group and be told who the out-group is. They don’t particularly care who the out-group is, Altemeyer finds they’ll aggress against any group an authority figure points to, even, if they don’t notice it, a group that contains them. They just have to believe the in-group is the norm.

This is why they have to believe games journalism is corrupt because of a handful of feminist media critics with outsized influence. Legitimate failures of journalism cannot be systemic problems rooted in how digital media is funded and consumed; there cannot be a legitimate market for social justice-y media. It has to be manipulation by the few. Because, if these things are common, then, even if you don’t like them, they’re normal. They’re part of the in-group. Reactionary politics is rebellion against things they dislike getting normalized, because they know, if they are normalized, they will have to accept them. Because the thing they care about most is being normal.

This is why the echo chamber, this is why Fox News, this is why the Far Right insists they are the “silent majority.” This is why they artificially inflate their numbers. This is why they insist facts are “biased.” They have to maintain the image that what are, in material terms, fringe beliefs are, in fact, held by the majority. This is why getting mocked by Stephen Colbert was such a blow to GamerGate. It makes it harder to believe the world at large agrees with them.

This is why, if you’re trying to change the world for the better, it’s pointless to ask their permission. Because, if you change the world around them, they will adapt even faster than you will.

THE ARGUMENT ISN’T SUPPOSED TO END

Casey Explosion has this really great Twitter thread comparing the Alt-Right to Scary Terry from Rick and Morty. His catchphrase is “you can run but you can’t hide, bitch.” And Rick and Morty finally escape him by hiding. And Morty’s all, “but he said we can’t hide,” and Rick is like, “why are we taking his word on this? if we could hide, he certainly wouldn’t tell us.”

The reason to argue with a GamerGater is on the implied agreement that, if you can convince them they’re part of a hate mob, they will leave. But look at the incentives here: they want to be in GamerGate, and you want them not to be. But they’re already in GamerGate. They’re not waiting on the outcome of this argument to participate. They’ve already got what they want; they don’t need to convince you GamerGate isn’t a hate mob.

This is why all their logic and rationalizations are shit, because they don’t need to be good. They’re not trying to win an argument. They’re trying to keep the argument going.

This has been a precept of conservative political strategy for decades. “You haven’t convinced us climate change is real and man-made, you need to do more studies.” They’re not pausing the use of fossil fuels until the results come in. “You haven’t convinced us there are no WMDs in Iraq, you need to collect more evidence.” They’re not suspending the war until you get back to them. “You haven’t convinced us that Reaganomic tax policy causes recessions, let’s just do it for another forty years and see what happens.” And when the proof comes in, they send us out for more, and we keep going.

The biggest indicator you can’t win a debate with a reactionary is they keep telling you you can. The biggest indicator protest and deplatforming works is they keep telling you in plays into their hands. The biggest indicator that you shouldn’t compromise with Republicans is they keep saying doing otherwise is stooping to their level. They’re not going to walk into the room and say, “Hi, my one weakness is reasoned argument, let’s pick a time and place to hash this out.”

And we fall for it because we’re trying to be decent people. Because we want to believe the truth always wins. We want to bargain in good faith, and they are weaponizing our good faith against us. Always dangling the carrot that the reason they’re like this is no one’s given them the right argument not to be. It’s all just a misunderstanding, and, really, it’s on us for not trying hard enough.

But they have no motivation to agree with us. Most of the people asking for debates have staked their careers on disagreeing with us. Conceding any point to the Left could cost them their livelihood.

WHY GAMES?

Let’s close with the big question: why games? And, honestly, the short answer is:

why not games?

Games culture has always presented itself as a hobby for young, white, middle class boys. It’s always been bigger and more diverse than that, but that’s how it was marketed, and that’s who most felt they belonged. As gaming grows bigger, there is suddenly room for those marginal voices that have always been there to make themselves heard. And, as gaming becomes more mainstream, it’s having its first brushes with serious critical analysis.

This makes the people who have long felt gaming was theirs and theirs alone anxious and a little angry. They’ve invested a lot of their identity in it and they don’t want it to change.

And what the Far Right sees in a sizable collection of aggrieved young men is an untapped market. This is why sites like Stormfront and Breitbart flocked to them. These are not liberals they have to convert, these people are, up til now, not politically engaged. The Right can be their first entry to politics.

The world was changing. Nerd properties were exploding into popular culture in tandem with media representation diversifying. And we were living with the first Black President. Any time an out-group looks like it might join the in-group, there is a self-protective backlash from the existing in-group. This had been brewing for a while, and, honestly, if it hadn’t boiled over in games, it would have boiled over somewhere else.

And, in the years since GamerGate, it has. The Far Right has tapped the comics, Star Wars, and sci-fi fandoms; they tried to get in with the furry community but failed spectacularly. They’re all over YouTube and, frankly, the atheist community was already in their pocket. Basically, if you’re in community with a bunch of young white guys who think they own the place, you might wanna have some talks with them sooner than later.

Anyway, if you want to know more about any of this stuff, RationalWiki’s timeline on GamerGate is pretty thorough. You can also watch my or Dan Olson’s videos on the subject. I’ll be putting the audio of this talk on YouTube and will put as many resources as I can in the show notes. The channel, again, is Innuendo Studios.

Sorry this was such a bummer.

Thank you for your time.

#video essay #alt-right playbook #Youtube

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my-emotional-self · 4 years ago

Text

Toxic Love Chapter 4

Pairings: Steve Rogers x Reader, Bucky Barnes x Reader, Steve Rogers x Reader x Bucky Barnes

Summary: Finding out your soulmates were Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes was one thing. But when someone from your past comes back to haunt you, you have to figure out if a relationship with two super soldiers is something you really want to pursue or if you’d rather go back to your comfortable single life.

Series Warnings: 18+, Swearing, Angst, Fluff, past mentions of rape, self-harm, attempted rape, domestic violence, stalking, death threats, possible Dark!Steve?, Steve will be an asshole a LOT in this series but I don’t know how dark it will get, explicit sexual content, mental health issues, kind of A/B/O dynamics but not really (no they are not actual wolves, more like the hierarchy), mentions of suicide, flashbacks of suicide

A/N: There will be no taglist for this story! I apologize in advance!

The three of you gathered around the kitchen island and ate the pizza. Well, more like Steve and Bucky inhaled a whole pizza each while you ate two slices. The pizza was delicious, probably the best you’d ever had and your stomach was grateful for the yumminess.

“Why don’t you tell us a little about yourself Y/N?” Bucky asked as he licked the grease off his lips.

“What do you want to know?” you replied.

“Let’s start with your family and where you grew up.”

You shrugged as you wiped your fingers with a napkin. “There isn’t really much to say. I grew up in a small town in the Midwest. Both my parents died when I was a teenager. I never knew my grandparents and I was an only child, same with my parents, so I don’t have any other family. I moved here when I was 20,” you stated honestly. Well, mostly at least. Yes, it was true both of your parents died, but how they died was tragic. They both committed suicide. First your mother, then your father one year later. As far back as you could research, mental health issues unfortunately ran in your family and that was including you. But you weren’t ready to open up that old wound yet. You were on medication to help it and that was that. Luckily the dosing you were on worked well and you could only hope you wouldn’t need to adjust your medications anytime soon.

“We know how you feel doll. Obviously all of our family is gone too. But we can make a new family with the three of us,” Bucky stated as he wrapped his metal arm around your shoulders. You liked the sound of that. The three of you becoming your own family. It sounded nice.

You gave Bucky a wide smile, mirroring his. “What have your past relationships looked like?” Steve announced from the other side of you.

This was something you had been debating on bringing up. If you weren’t going to tell them about your mental health issues just yet, you didn’t want to lie and be dishonest about John as well. Taking a deep breath, you held it in for five seconds before releasing it. “I’ve only been in one relationship before. His name was John, John Smith. He’s in prison right now.”

From the corner of your eye you could see Steve clench his fist; his knuckles cracking in the process. “What happened?” he growled out.

“He…he umm. Well, he hit me,” you said, almost as quiet as a mouse but you knew both men had super hearing and they damn well heard you.

Steve slammed his fist on the granite countertop making you flinch.

“Steve!” Bucky barked at him in anger. “You’re not making this situation any better right now. Calm the fuck down and let her talk.” Bucky soothed his arm up and down your back. “Go ahead doll. We’re listening.”

Nodding, you began to speak again. “Things were great in the beginning. He seemed like everything I could have ever asked for in a man. I didn’t know if or when I would ever meet the two of you so I decided to live my life and date him. The first six months were a whirlwind of romance. He was the most charming man I had ever met. But then things took a turn when I moved in with him. I was ready to have sex yet, but he was sick of waiting. That first night I moved in, he…he raped me.”

This time you saw Bucky’s right hand clench on the table in front of you while Steve knocked his chair over as he stood up, pacing the kitchen. “Go on doll,” Bucky urged, trying to keep the anger out of his voice as best he could for you.

“That was just the first time. He umm, he did it again for weeks. I wanted to leave, I really did. But he was rich and he had security around the house. I knew I couldn’t just up and leave. Finally, when he demanded I quit my job, I stood up to him and told him no. That was the first time he hit me. That continued for months. I was ready to give up on myself.”

“What happened next huh? How did he end up in prison?” Steve demanded as he leaned over the counter, staring at you with those piercing eyes.

“I got lucky,” you replied. “We were out shopping one day. He felt bad for the wrist he broke the night before so he took me shopping. One of the sales ladies escorted me into a fitting room and I slipped her a note letting her know what was going on. I stayed in the fitting room for as long as possible. And then I heard them. The police. The sales lady called the police for me and they took him away. He’s been locked up ever since.”

Closing your eyes, you let the tears slip down your cheek. “You were so brave,” Bucky cooed as you felt his lips on the top of your head.

“Look at me Y/N,” Steve demanded yet again and that deep feeling to please him was happening again. You snapped your head up and looked directly into his eyes. “That will never happen in this relationship. Do you understand me?” You simply nodded. “Bucky and I would never hurt you like that. Ever. You have our word.” As soon as he finished talking, he stormed out of the kitchen and down the hallway to where you only assumed was his room.

“Just give him a minute to cool off sweetheart,” Bucky spoke in your ear. “Stevie gets pent up sometimes and he has a lot on his plate. He may seem like it, but he’s not mad at you. I promise.”

You collapsed into Bucky’s chest and softy sobbed. It felt like a weight was lifted off your shoulders and you were relieved to have told them about John. “I’m so sorry you had to go through that doll. That will never happen to you again. We won’t let anything like that happen.”

It couldn’t have been more than 10 minutes later when Steve emerged from his room. “How about we go down and show you the communal kitchen and living room. Give you a little tour. What do you say?”

A small smile broke across your face. “I’d like that very much.”

As the elevators opened to the communal floor, you jaw dropped. If you thought Steve and Bucky’s apartment was big, this was ten times the size. Not only were there ample more couches, the television was bigger and there was a large dining table big enough to sit at least twenty people.

“Holy crap,” you exclaimed in awe.

“Yeah, Tony likes to go big if you couldn’t already tell,” Steve joked.

“You think?” you quipped back, earning a smirk from Steve.

The entire space was void of anyone except the three of you as Steve pulled you further into the living room. He explained that the group tries to do a movie night at least once a week. “To make things as fair as possible, Tony pulls a name out of a hat to see who gets to pick the movie that night,” Bucky said.

“Yeah but it doesn’t really work. There is still always complaining and bitching from everyone else. Mainly Clint,” Steve chimed in.

It made you giggle, genuinely giggle and it felt good. That hadn’t happened in quite some time.

Steve and Bucky guided you towards the hallway, explaining that these were the ‘hobby rooms’ of everyone and their soulmates. Steve opened the door to the one at the end of the all on right left side.

“This will be your room. You can make it anything you want. But I’m going to guess this will be your game room where you work.”

“That would be correct,” you answered as you turned on the light. The room was very decent sized and you would have no problem fitting all of your gamer stuff in here. Hell, there would be a lot of room left over and you were quickly trying to think what else you could fit in here.

“C’mon. Let’s go back to our floor and we can show you your room up there.”

On the elevator ride back to their apartment, Steve and Bucky explained who all lived in the tower and who their soulmates were. Tony and Pepper were soulmates together, along with Bruce. Bruce was best friends with Tony and more of a brother figure to Pepper. Then there was Natasha, Clint and Darcy Lewis and they were all in an intimate relationship together. Lastly, there was Thor and Jane but they didn’t stay in the tower too much as they spent most of their time on Asgard.

Steve stopped in front of your door. It was across the hall from Bucky’s and right next door to Steve’s.

“Go ahead and open it,” Steve said with a smile. “Just place your hand over the screen.”

Taking a deep breath, you did as he said and placed your hand, palm down, on the digital screen where there would normally have been a doorknob. With a soft click, the door opened for you and you walked into your new place. It was nothing like what you were thinking. You were honestly just guessing it would be a bedroom, but no, this was an entire apartment.

Straight ahead was a decent sized kitchen. There was dark cherry wood cabinet with black granite countertops and stainless steel appliances. To the left is what you would assume would be the living room, however it was completely bare of any furniture. As you continued to move through the apartment you found that the bedroom was all the way in the back. It was a very nice sized master bedroom with the biggest walk in closet and on suite bathroom you had ever seen.

“What do you think?” Bucky asked as he came up behind you and placed his hands on your shoulders.

“It’s big,” you replied with a chuckle.

“I’m going to have Tony’s interior designer email you. Give him examples and ideas of what you would like and she will make it happen. Don’t worry about prices. This is Tony’s gift to you.”

Your eyes grew wide at his statement. “Are you sure?”

“Yes sweetheart,” Steve replied as he slipped his hand in yours. “We want the best for you. Whatever you want this new home of yours to look like, then so be it. We will make it happen for you.”

~~~

That night as you lay in bed after spending time with Steve and Bucky, you couldn’t help but frown. Things had seemed to be going much better tonight than they did when you first met them two days ago. Now, you had to pack up your apartment and move. You weren’t really nervous about that part, hell, you were looking forward to it. But then it meant things were starting to get real. When things start to get intimate with them, would you be able to let yourself go and do that? Would things be vanilla in the bedroom? Would you be able to tell them that because the only sexual experiences you’ve ever had was being raped, that you could now only get yourself off on violent fantasies of being raped, or tied up, or choked? Fuck, what was wrong with you?

#steve rogers x reader #steve rogers x you #steve rogers fanfiction #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes x you #bucky barnes fanfiction #steve rogers fanfic #steve rogers smut #bucky barnes fanfic #bucky barnes smut #dark!steve rogers #dark! steve rogers

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gameofdrarry · 4 years ago

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Wizards Hearts Recs: Memory Loss

Wizards Hearts was a four-month-long Drarry reading fest. Players were given a playing deck of 52 tropes, and were asked to find 52 different fics to read and comment on to fill their decks. To prevent the same few fics from being read, fics were restricted to only being used for the game three times before being considered ineligible for further points. The tropes and submissions list can be found here.

Check out the masterlist of fics for this trope below the cut!

📜 Twist of Fate by Oakstone730 Rated: Teen and Up Words: 302209 Tags: Canon up until Epilogue, Triwizard, Book 4: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Redemption, Forgiveness, Angst, Memory Loss, Secret Relationships, obliviate, secret boyfriends Summary: Draco asks Harry to help him beat the Imperius curse during 4th year. The lessons turn into more than either expected. A story of redemption and forgiveness. Pairings: HP/DM (Slash) Timeframe: 1994-2002 Goblet to 4 yrs post-DH EWE Rating T for language, high angst, content. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 The Four Doors by fluxweed Rated: Explicit Words: 48845 Tags: Mind Healer Draco Malfoy, Legilimency (Harry Potter), Memory Loss, Memory Magic, Sexual Fantasy, Masturbation, Power Imbalance, Auror Harry Potter, Dubious Consent Due To Identity Issues, Dubious Consent Due To Patient/Healer Dynamic, Mind Fucking (Literally), Not Epilogue Compliant, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE Summary: It’s been four months since Harry lost his memory. Four months of dead ends and no answers. With time running out until his memories are gone for good, Harry agrees to a course of Legilimency therapy with a renowned specialist: Mind Healer Draco Malfoy. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 remember me by hupsoonheng Rated: Teen and Up Words: 31082 Tags: Amnesia, Temporary Amnesia, Obliviation, Established Relationship, Established Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter, Legilimency, Age Regression/De-Aging, Angst, Depression, Suicidal Thoughts, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Reformed Draco Malfoy, POV Draco Malfoy, Good Draco Malfoy, Gardens & Gardening, Angst with a Happy Ending, Happy Ending, POV Harry Potter Summary: On a chilly day in October, Draco kisses Harry goodbye before he goes on yet another dangerous, undercover mission with the Aurors. And then Harry doesn't come back. Only Draco believes that Harry isn't dead, and pours himself into finding his husband despite his friends' pleas to move on and grieve properly. What he finds at the end of that work, though, is not at all what he wanted. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 Like Clockwork by agentmoppet Rated: Explicit Words: 39374 Tags: Memory Loss, Unspeakable Harry Potter, Curse Breaker Draco Malfoy, Dream Spells, UST, RST, Blow Jobs, Anal Sex, Switching, Banter, Bickering, Case Fic, Pining, Community: hd_erised, Miscommunication, Drinking, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Minor Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley Summary: Draco has never been very good at trusting others, and Potter is no exception. But if they're going to survive this, they need to accept that they're holding each other's lives in their hands, and--worst of all--they're going to have to work together. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 Of Fates Entwined: A Story of Love Lost and Found by taradiane Rated: Explicit Words: 51517 Tags: Romance, Memory Loss, Kidnapping, Angst with a Happy Ending Summary: Harry Potter vanished without a trace from his home on a warm summer morning in June 2004. This is the story of how a random visit in a cafe on the other side of the world, six years later, proved that the ties which entwine our fates together can never be broken. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 while you were away by GhostGrrl Rated: Explicit Words: 3420 Tags: Angst, Denial of Feelings, Ambiguous/Open Ending, Kinda:), Memory Loss, Falling In Love, Dirty Talk, Anal Sex, Drugs, References to Depression Summary: Harry loses his memory in the spring. Draco loves him through it. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 Misplaced Memories by Dacro Rated: Explicit Words: 38749 Tags: Memory Loss, Attempted Kidnapping, Established Relationship, St Mungo's Hospital, Auror Harry, Healer Draco, Dirty Talk, Semi-Public Sex, Grief/Mourning, Mystery, Injury Recovery, Same-Sex Marriage, Hair-pulling, Dream Sex, Wedding Rings Summary: Harry is hit by an unknown curse and loses eighteen years of his memories. When he wakes up, he doesn't remember magic, Hogwarts or that he's happily married to a former Death Eater. Draco struggles to adapt to the changes and tries to help Harry retrieve his memories without causing further damage. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 Nothing, Everything by SasuNarufan13 Rated: Mature Words: 76088 Tags: Draco's POV, Established slash, Doesn't follow the epilogue, Mpreg, Angst, a lot of it, Implied Violence, Memory Loss, Drama, Draco acts like a real arsehole for a good part of the story, birthday fic, angst but with a happy ending, References to Minor Character Death, Torture, Implied mature content, Brief reference to threat of rape in the past Summary: Draco didn't sign up for this. Except, well, he did. He just can't remember it. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 Saint (gift four) by crazyparakiss Rated: Mature Words: 5300 Tags: Mpreg, Amnesia, Angst with a Happy Ending Summary: Draco digs his fingers into the thick cable-knit of Potter’s cream jumper, drawing him closer. Kissing the stranger wearing his lover’s face. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 The Dust of Water by Lomonaaeren Rated: Mature Words: 144015 Tags: Amnesia, Angst, Drama, Romance Summary: As far as Harry’s concerned, he’s woken from a weirdly deep sleep the day after the Battle of Hogwarts. It’s his friends who tell him that it’s ten years later, that he’s an Auror who got cursed while chasing a Dark wizard—and that his memory isn’t going to come back. Updated every Saturday. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 UnKnown by DorthyAnn Rated: Mature Words: 22488 Tags: Bullying, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Self Destructive Behaviour, Ostracism, lying, lying by omission, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Memory Loss, Memory Alteration, Loneliness, That feeling of being in a room full of people you know and being completely and utterly alone, H/D Hurt!Fest 2020, Power Imbalance Summary: Draco just wanted a second chance, he was willing to work hard, he was willing to do whatever it took, but no one would let him live down his past. But when he recklessly casts a spell promising a new life, he's not prepared for the consequences... ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 Ship of Theseus by GallaPlacidia Rated: Teen and Up Words: 18240 Tags: Amnesia, Angst, Established Relationship, Angst with a Happy Ending, plenty of pining, a touch of infidelity but not between Harry and Draco, Hurt/Comfort, Draco and Ginny are best friends, Oneshot Summary: When Harry gets amnesia and forgets he and Draco were ever married, he refuses treatment to remember. Inspired by an EXCELLENT fic by hupsoonheng called Remember Me. You don't need to have read it to understand this, but tbh you should just do yourself a favour and read it anyway. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 Adrift by dysonrules Rated: Mature Words: 13568 Tags: Pirates, Alternate Universe, EWE, Romance Summary: Auror Harry takes a vacation in the Caribbean and ends up falling from the sky, straight into the lap of Draco Malfoy, modern pirate. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 Hidden in Plain Sight by Momatu Rated: Explicit Words: 56686 Tags: HP: EWE, Slash, Romance, Some Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Angst, Drama Summary: Set four years after the Battle of Hogwarts, three years after Draco was abducted by person or persons unknown. Draco is now living in a small Muggle community and working in a library with no idea the Wizarding World exists, until one day, a bloke with a mop of just-shagged black hair comes in for storytime with a little boy to get out of the rain. Featured Book: Muggles Who Notice ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 Just Another Recollection by mishaphappens Rated: Mature Words: 13222 Tags: Memory Loss, Magic, Memory Magic, Explicit Sexual Content, Falling In Love, Future Fic, Pensieves, Angst and Humor Summary: Draco’s short-term memory is destroyed from Harry’s dueling spell, causing him to wake up every morning like it’s just the next day. When, in fact, it has been three years. We come in on the morning that Draco wakes up early and finds a Mister Harry Potter in his bed... ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 In Loco Parentis by Phoenixstrike Rated: Explicit Words: 46797 Tags: Rape/Non-Con, Male Slash, Explicit Sexual Content, Rape/Non-con References, Original Character Death(s) Summary: Five years ago Draco Malfoy and his wife were kidnapped, and nothing has been heard or seen of the pair since. It's been so long that Draco is presumed dead. Harry dotes on Draco's son, Scorpius, with whom he has been living. But when it turns out Malfoy isn't quite as dead as everyone assumed, Harry's life is turned upside-down. Set after Deathly Hallows and ignores epilogue. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 Heaven Through a Window by JocundaSykes Rated: Explicit Words: 81,211 Tags: Non-Canonical Post-War Timeline, POV Draco Malfoy, Ensemble Cast, Healer Draco Malfoy, Auror Harry Potter, Pining, Slow Burn, Falling In Love, Snogging on Benches, Explicit Sexual Content, Sock Garters, Accidental Harry Acquisition, no infidelity, No character bashing, Obliviator Pansy Parkinson, Dysfunctional Family, Harry Potter Partially Epilogue Compliant, H/D Erised 2020, Drinking, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism (Not Harry/Draco), Smoking, Consensual Legilimency, Implied/Referenced Dieting, Memory Loss, Memory Charm | Obliviate (Harry Potter), Additional Warnings In Author's Note Summary: Life is going swimmingly for Draco: he’s a respected Healer, his son is excellent in every way, and none of his patients have died recently. Then he gets landed with Perfect Potter and his hordes of stupid friends. It’s intolerable. But the more time Draco spends with the lonely boy from Surrey, the more he believes that there might be a hero within us all. ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 Partners by DeiStarr Rated: Teen and Up Words: 1,530 Tags: Slash, Male Slash, Gay Male Character, Romance, Memory Loss, Hurt/Comfort, HP: EWE, Auror Partners, Auror Harry, Auror Draco, Denial, Denial of Feelings Summary: Draco and Harry are Auror partners and have been for years. Harry does not have a crush on Draco; he just doesn't. Then one day he gets into an accident... ❤️ Read on AO3

📜 (leave me with) a foggy mind by p1013 Rated: Explicit Words: 4739 Tags: Heavy Drinking, Memory Loss, Confessions, Embarrassment, Porn with Feelings, Love Bites, Hands, Couch Sex, Anal Sex, Harry Potter Epilogue What Epilogue | EWE, Dubious Consent, tagging dub con for not remembering the night before Summary: Draco's halfway through a sip of some ridiculously named and priced mixed drink when Pansy says, as casual as someone commenting on the weather, "I think that's Harry Potter in the corner." ❤️ Read on AO3

#wizards hearts #drarry recs #drarry #wh masterlist #game of drarry

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dragynkeep · 3 years ago

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is the Adam artist thing about lisafahrenheit? I was curious so I looked at their blog and the only post I could find that would get that reaction was one that specifically condemned people who enthusiastically consume pedo and cp content to the point that it's part of their personlity. Was that enough to get you vagueposting about them? Idk I just think slapping someone who made a point of mentioning how shallow 'pro' and 'anti' labels are with 'anti' over that just feels a bit off, y'know?

1. stop fucking calling it cp, child abuse is not a porn category & both csa survivors & organizations who help us have begged people to stop calling it this.

2. the post lisa reblogges was purely about fictional content with ableist undertones, written by antis which we have both warned will earn a block. this rhetoric harms survivors, no one is consuming csem or "pedophilic content" when it's fictional & PIXELS. pro fiction people have explained this over & over & over.

3. if it walks like an anti, talks like an anti & spreads rhetoric like an anti then i will call them an anti; even if they don't "care" for the "pro/anti debate" like obviously they are enough to spout unfounded, harmful nonsense. especially when we're not seeing the same for antis who make death threats, suicide baiting, rape threats & doxxing part of their personality. it's only ever pro fiction ppl who say to stop fucking harassing people & just block. which is what i did so no, it's not "a bit off", im doing exactly what we said we would do on our pinned. good art doesn't excuse shitty, harmful mentalities. 💕

#salt #owl.txt #answered

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kagetatsumis · 4 years ago

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read shadow of the fox by julie kagawa!

cindy’s back with the ever insistent message that you should read shadow of the fox by julie kagawa! why should you read it?

found family

immersed in beautiful japanese mythology

high-stakes battles that deliver

a non traditional heroine who isn’t a warrior but her growth is really beautiful and she’s strong anyway

slowburn romance it’s the longing

great humor, well developed characters

literally if you’ve followed me this long and have not been interested in seeing tatsumi and yumeko like ??? have you been ignoring my textposts

cindy recommends it !!! fangirl with cindy :)

don’t know what it’s about? here, i’ll paste the synopsis for you so you won’t be too lazy to google it <3

One thousand years ago, the great Kami Dragon was summoned to grant a single terrible wish—and the land of Iwagoto was plunged into an age of darkness and chaos.

Now, for whoever holds the Scroll of a Thousand Prayers, a new wish will be granted. A new age is about to dawn.

Raised by monks in the isolated Silent Winds temple, Yumeko has trained all her life to hide her yokai nature. Half kitsune, half human, her skill with illusion is matched only by her penchant for mischief. Until the day her home is burned to the ground, her adoptive family is brutally slain and she is forced to flee for her life with the temple’s greatest treasure—one part of the ancient scroll.

There are many who would claim the dragon’s wish for their own. Kage Tatsumi, a mysterious samurai of the Shadow Clan, is one such hunter, under orders to retrieve the scroll…at any cost. Fate brings Kage and Yumeko together. With a promise to lead him to the scroll, an uneasy alliance is formed, offering Yumeko her best hope for survival. But he seeks what she has hidden away, and her deception could ultimately tear them both apart.

With an army of demons at her heels and the unlikeliest of allies at her side, Yumeko’s secrets are more than a matter of life or death. They are the key to the fate of the world itself.

Content and trigger warnings for graphic violence, graphic murder, graphic death, loss of a loved one, physical abuse, threat of rape, talk of suicide (seppuku), war themes, alcohol consumption, and insects (there is a scene with description of spiders, it is chapter 3)

#cindy talks #did i make this post just to pin it #:) yes i did #read! sotf!#i'm serious #i want to scream about it so badly #but yall sleeping on it !!!!#so i'm going to be annoying !!!!#you want to read about diverse lit?#here i'll help you

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yandere-mc-yt · 4 years ago

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Content Warning & QnA

Before we get to the questions let me be completely upfront and obvious:

This is literally an 18+ Yandere Imagines blog that touches Dark Themes. This blog will talk about and explore every aspect of a Yandere character- from the sweet and harmless to the dangerous and sadistic. This blog will also have no qualms with talking about dark subjects such as: rape/noncon, incest, drugs, alcoholism, physical, emotional and sexual abuse, torture, suicide, mental illness, and death. Probably more shit if I could name it but this is the gist of it.

Now that is to say that Romanticizing or OVER Sexualizing these subjects and putting them in a postive light are not my intentions. I'm sorry if it may come off as such but I promise you it's not. I do tend to accidentally make it sound romantic but I promise I don't condone any of this behavior irl. Fiction is a safe way to explore these things if you know your limits. If these things have disturbed you or given you unhealthy ideas, please unfollow and block my blog for your own mental health and wellbeing.

QnA

Do you do [gender/sexuality] reader?

Yes! I'm a queer dmab person myself and would love it! Don't be worried if you think I'll reject your ask based off of gender or identity!!

Hey why do you headcanon/write [character] like that? [Other Blog] writes them like this!

Well that's because I have a different idea of how this character would act! Since these are all headcanons, different writers could have different headcanons for these characters.

Excuse me but that character is OOC!! In canon they-

Just like headcanons, people can also interpret characters differently. Of course I'm an unreliable narrator so I'm just writing them based off of my perspective! :)

Would it bother you if I sent you multi asks in a row? Sorry to bother you!

Absolutely not a problem!! I may not answer to back to back but as long as they're in my inbox, they'll get answered!

Do you do matchups?

Sorry but no. Perhaps in the future...?

[Insert long and complicated imagine ask]

I'm sorry but this is very confusing. Can you maybe dumb it down for me?

Hey is it REALLY okay if I ask about [noncon/incest/abuse/ect]? :(

YES. It's okay- I'll always add a trigger warning before the answered ask as well.

Can I ask for NSFW of [younger mcyt]?

Since I'm freshly 18 and everyone is at least 17? Yes- but ONLY becuase they're in my own age range and will also be aged up a bit. This is for the character by the way: everyone is written with the intent of being 18+.

[Insert drama/discourse]

[Deletes] :)

[Insert gross and extremely sexualized ask about abuse]

[Deletes] :)

[Insert rape or death threat meant to dishearten me]

[Deletes] :)

#masterlist

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whump-tr0pes · 4 years ago

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HB4-41/Whumptober day 26

This is a series. Start here, continued from here.

This is a sequel to Honor Bound, Honor Bound 2, Honor Bound 3, and Vera.

AO3

Masterlist

Content warning: migraine aftermath, emesis mention, attempted murder, victim-blaming, talk of death, past noncon of a minor (not discussed in any detail), death threats, suicidal actions (not for the reason you think), blood mention

@eatyourdamnpears, darlin... enjoy.

The first thing Gavin was aware of was light filtering into the room through the curtains. The second was the soft touch of Isaac’s fingers carding through his hair. Gavin sighed and rolled towards his warmth before he remembered moving caused him agony – and relief struck him when his head only throbbed a little bit.

He blinked his eyes open. Isaac was sitting on the bed, fully clothed, gently smoothing Gavin’s hair.

“Ugh,” Gavin mumbled.

“Morning,” Isaac murmured, and bent to gently kiss Gavin’s forehead. “Feeling better?”

Gavin experimentally lifted his head. The room still seemed to push against Gavin, his brain still pressing against the insides of his skull, but his stomach was settled, and his sight was clear. His mouth tasted foul. He was desperately thirsty.

“Um, yeah,” he croaked. “Fuck.”

“Yeah.” Isaac’s mouth twisted in a sad smile. “I just wanted to check on you before I head out.”

Gavin shifted in the bed and slowly, painfully pushed himself upright. “Why? Where you going?” He rubbed sleep out of his eyes. “What time is it?”

“It’s about eight,” Isaac murmured. “AM. You slept through the night. Finn said you needed it.”

“Ugh. I’m… I’m sorry about yesterday.” Gavin flushed. Isaac had stayed by his side for hours, changing the trashcan after Gavin vomited up the tea and water he’d slowly been sipping. Isaac had kept the compresses cool and gently massaged the back of Gavin’s neck, when Gavin was aware enough to respond. And…

And Isaac wanted to stay with him for a lifetime.

Gavin’s throat bobbed as he swallowed. He never thought… never imagined… that Isaac might want him that way, too.

“Hey, it’s…” Isaac’s hand curved along Gavin’s jaw. “It’s okay. I was, um, happy to… to do it. For you.” Isaac wet his lips and glanced at the floor. “I’m headed into Burmingham. They’ve got some migraine pills, something with Tylenol and aspirin and caffeine, I think. If you have another migraine before the ri— before the stronger stuff gets in, this will hold it off. And we’re low on food. We need a few things.”

“Oh,” Gavin said flatly. “Um… I w-wish I could, um, come with you, but… I just… don’t feel right, still.”

“…and you’re supposed to be dead,” Isaac said gently.

Gavin’s eyes slid shut. “Right. That, too.” His hand crept out across the sheets and settled on Isaac’s knee. “Be safe.”

“Always try to be,” Isaac said with a wry smile. “Sometimes shit finds me, you know?”

Gavin bit his lip. “I know. But… please… please try.”

Please come back to me. I worry every time you leave.

“Yeah, Gavin. I… I will.” Isaac leaned in and softly kissed the scars on Gavin’s nose, cheek, and eye. “Vera and Tori are coming, too. Gray’s headed into Crayton today. They got a call about a refugee. And Finn and Ellis are gonna be out, too. They wanted to walk south, see if any of the properties that way are occupied.”

“Will… is that safe? With… with the baby?” Gavin glanced up at Isaac.

A slow smile spread across Isaac’s face. “Yeah. Ellis will be fine. They’d punch you for being concerned.”

Gavin huffed out a weak laugh. “Yeah,” he said. “So… Sam and Edrissa? They’ll be home?”

“Yeah,” Isaac said. His hand found Gavin’s and gave a quick squeeze. “I’ve gotta go. Vera and Tori are waiting for me. I just wanted to check on you and make sure you’re okay.”

“Yeah, I’m… I’m good,” Gavin said, and pushed back the covers. “I think I’ll take a shower. And get some water.”

“Just relax today,” Isaac said as he stood. “Finn said the migraines can be caused by stress. Just rest.”

“Yeah,” Gavin groaned as he stretched. “I’ll see you in a few hours.”

“Yeah,” Isaac said, and paused. He quickly stooped and pressed a kiss to Gavin’s cheek, before he straightened with a smile and hurried from the room.

Gavin watched Isaac go, and stared through the doorway for a long while after he left. He drew a hand through his hair and sighed. He slowly pushed himself to his feet and swayed for a moment, putting out a hand to stabilize himself.

“Fuck,” he mumbled. He had to brush his teeth first. Then water, then food. Then shower. He wandered out of his room to the bathroom.

The walls seemed to wobble slightly around him as he made his way down the hall. He flipped on the bathroom light and flinched at the flash of white light that burst inside his head. He peeled his eyes open and stepped up to the sink.

He kept his eyes down from the mirror. Even though it had been weeks, he just… couldn’t bring himself to look in the mirror. He didn’t know what he would see, and it didn’t matter if he didn’t look. He wet his toothbrush, smeared on a bit of toothpaste, and brushed his teeth. It felt good to scrub away the taste in his mouth. When he was done, he bent to take a swallow of water, then another, then another. His throat ached with thirst. He wiped his mouth and wandered into the kitchen.

He pulled a cup down from the cabinet and filled it in the sink. He took a drink, then another, then another. Soon, the cup was empty. He filled it again, and drained it. He looked into the sink and wondered if he could find the tea Edrissa made for him – for Ellis – yesterday.

“Gavin?”

He jumped and whirled around. Edrissa stood in the doorway to the living room, her hands behind her back, looking steadily at Gavin.

Gavin swallowed thickly. “Um… h-hi, Edrissa.”

Edrissa shifted her weight. “Um, hi. Can I… can I ask a favor?”

Gavin gulped and stared at her, bewildered. “Um… yeah?”

Edrissa gave a curt nod and walked through the kitchen and out into the laundry room. She pushed the door open to the outside and disappeared into the yard. Gavin blinked once, and hurried to follow her.

She was halfway across the yard. The sun was already high in the sky, burning away the mist from the night before. Gavin’s stomach bucked as the ground dipped under him. He stumbled after her as she headed towards the barn.

She pushed back the door and glanced behind her to make sure Gavin was still there. He followed her in and stopped just inside the doorway.

“Edrissa, um, h-hey. What… what do you need? Where’s Sam?”

“They’re still sleeping,” she said airily. “And, um, I needed… I couldn’t reach something. There’s a basket on that shelf that I wanted to get.” She pointed at a row of shelves along the wall. There was a woven basket on the top shelf, far out of her reach.

Gavin gave her a hesitant smile. “Oh. I…” A trickle of warmth moved through his chest, surprise and relief and gratitude that Edrissa – Edrissa, of all people – would want his help with something. He turned and walked to the shelf. He had to stretch up on his toes to reach it. His hands closed on the rough wicker rim of it and he turned around to hand it to her.

She was already at his side. She grabbed his arm, twisted, and flipped him over her leg. The basket flew from his hand.

He landed hard on his back. It knocked the wind out of him and he gasped, mouth gaping, his chest aching for air.

Edrissa was on top of him in an instant, straddling his hips. Before he could draw air to ask what the hell she was doing, she had a knife to his throat, pressing up under his chin.

He froze. She stared down at him, her eyes blazing with rage and hate.

He finally dragged in a breath. “Edrissa,” he whispered. “What… what are you—”

“Shut up,” she hissed. Her hand fumbled in his hair and she clumsily jerked his head back. “You, you might have the, the others fooled, but not me.”

A chill moved down Gavin’s spine. His heart pounded in his chest. “Edrissa… I… I don’t know what you’re—”

“Syndicate shit,” she spat. “You, you betrayed them all down south, didn’t you? You… you handed them over to your, your mom, didn’t you?” Her voice rose to a furious, ragged shout.

“No,” Gavin whispered. He winced as the knife’s jagged edge bit into his skin. Tears formed in his eyes. His hands jerked upwards to grab the knife, grab her. He shuddered as a wave of poisonous rage punched through him, filling him up, making him want to throw her off of him and pin her down, hold the knife to her throat, make her feel afraid.

No. He pushed down the rage, the vicious desire to make her hurt and bleed and beg him for mercy. He forced his hands down and pressed them flat against the floor. That’s not who I am anymore.

“I know what you are,” Edrissa snarled. “I know. I know you’re an evil syndicate shit and you can’t change. You can’t stop hurting people. Can’t stop killing.”

“I haven’t killed anyone in—”

Edrissa yanked at his hair. “Shut up,” she whimpered, her voice tight with tears. “Shut, shut up. You— I can’t believe Isaac can’t see it. He… he should hate you. They all should.”

Gavin’s eyes fluttered closed. “I know,” he whispered.

Edrissa paused. Gavin opened his eyes to stare at the ceiling, holding perfectly still. Two tears ran into his hair. The knife trembled against his throat.

“You… you shouldn’t have come back alive,” she hissed.

“I know,” he said weakly.

Edrissa’s face twisted with hate. She pressed the knife harder against his throat. He flinched and forced his hands down harder against the floor. “There’s… there’s nothing good inside you. There’s nothing but evil. You c-can’t change, you can’t be… be redeemed. Syndicate bastards don’t change.”

Gavin pushed out a shuddering breath. “No,” he whispered. “That’s… that’s not true.”

“Yes it is!” she shrieked at him. “You’re all bad, every single one. You all hurt and rape and… and kill…” She gasped and hitched a shaking sob. “You don’t know how to be anything else. And I… I know it.” A tear trailed down her cheek and fell onto his shirt.

“I’m sorry,” Gavin breathed. “I’m sorry that happened to you. But it… it wasn’t—”

“I said shut up!” she sobbed, her face contorted with rage. “I’m… I’m going to kill you, Gavin Stormbeck. I’ve been training for weeks. I know how to kill you.”

Gavin’s stomach lurched. Terror caught in his throat. He could do it, he could tear the knife from her grasp and hold it to her throat. He could cut her, tear into her, lay open her flesh until her screams tapered into dying gasps. He’d done it before. He could make her pay, make her suffer.

No. I’m different. For Isaac. For the others.

For me.

“P-please don’t,” he whispered.

Edrissa blinked. Her hand tightened in Gavin’s hair and she jammed the knife harder against his throat. The serrated edge caught the skin there, but it was dull, not quite breaking through. He hissed in a breath and trembled under her hands.

“Are you… are you going to stop me, syndicate shit?” she whispered, sounding full of rage. Sounding hopeful.

Gavin weakly shook his head, the pain still pounding weakly behind his left eye. “No,” he murmured.

Edrissa’s breath froze in her chest. “Well you… well you should. I… I’m going to kill you, Gavin Stormbeck.” She whimpered, and her hand tightened around the knife.

“My name is Gavin Uriah,” Gavin whispered.

For a moment, neither moved. Gavin lay still, muscles locked, under Edrissa. She trembled as he held Gavin down, the knife still poised at his throat.

“Y-you should stop me,” she whispered. “You should try to, to hurt me. I’m a plaything, right? I deserve to be hurt.” Her lip curled. Her voice lashed him, bitter and poisonous.

“You’re not,” Gavin said evenly, and shook his head. “I’m sorry you ever were. It’s not right. You didn’t deserve it. No one does.”

Edrissa sobbed, helpless. “But I do now, right? I deserve it. For, for saying I’m going to kill you. I should be punished for it. I should… I should die.” Her eyes blazed as she leaned over Gavin, tears running down her cheeks.

“No,” Gavin whispered. “You don’t deserve that.”

Edrissa’s chest heaved with shuddering breaths as her hand tightened in Gavin’s hair. Then, her pain dropped away. Her eyes went dead. She leaned back and held the knife to her own throat. It was a steak knife, heavy and dull, the worn wooden handle held tight in her grip.

“Stop me, Stormbeck,” she said flatly. “This is how you stop me. If you don’t do it, I’m going to kill you.”

Gavin bit his lip and shook his head. “No,” he murmured. “I won’t. My name is Uriah.”

Edrissa snarled and grabbed at Gavin’s wrist. She jerked his hand up off the floor and forced it around the handle of the knife. She wrapped her hand around his and forced the blade against her throat. “Do it,” she hissed. “Syndicate shit.”

Gavin met her eyes. He ached at the depth of hate there, of pain. Of loss. Two years of her life, her childhood, her innocence, her brother. All dead, killed by syndicate hands. Taken and broken, just like Gavin had done with so many lives.

She could be just another life to end. Gavin could press the knife in, rip it through her throat, bleed her out over his hands, watch her die on the floor here. He could tell the others it was self-defense. It would be.

Gavin set his jaw. “No,” he said, fiercely. Evenly.

Edrissa’s eyes went wide. Her hand slipped from around his. He pulled the knife away from her throat.

She buried her face in her hands and wailed.

Gavin tossed the knife away. It skittered into the corner and hit the wall with a light thump. He shifted, rolling slightly to the side, gently placing his hands on her shoulders to ease her off of him. She slumped to her knees and sobbed into her hands, her voice echoing through the barn, her sorrow, her pain, all tearing free at once. Gavin pushed himself backwards on his hands until he was out of her reach. He wrapped his arms around his knees and shivered, his eyes still fixed on her as she fell apart.

“Why won’t you do it?” she sobbed, not looking at him.

“Because… because I don’t want to,” he said, doing his best to make his voice gentle, panting with relief.

“But you’re… you’re a Stormbeck,” she wailed. “You’re one of them. You can’t… why won’t you hurt me? It’s what you… what you are.”

“Not anymore,” Gavin said, his voice tight with tears. “That’s not what I am at all. I’m… I’m not a Stormbeck. I’m Gavin Uriah. I’m not… like that anymore.”

“But why?” she whimpered. She shivered and squeezed her arms around her waist.

Gavin swiped the tears out of his eyes. “I don’t know,” he said, finally.

Edrissa rocked herself, her eyes unfocused and faraway. “You k-killed my brother,” she whispered.

Gavin opened his mouth to defend himself, to tell her it wasn’t him. It wasn’t his family.

It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter to her. It didn’t matter at all.

“I… I was happy,” she whispered. “With my… my parents. I was happy. With Micah. I had… I had a boyfriend.”

Gavin’s eyes slid shut. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“I… h-had a cat,” she whimpered. Her voice broke. “I had… a, a life.”

Gavin kept silent. The weight of her sorrow crushed him, pounded in his head. He rubbed at the scratch the knife had left on the soft skin of his throat.

A sob rippled over her shoulders. “I… I just want to stop hurting.” She bit down on her hand and wailed her grief.

“I’m sorry,” Gavin whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

Edrissa sobbed, incoherent words falling from her lips. The sound of her cries shook the air inside the barn. Gavin winced as it pressed against the inside of his skull. He buried his face in his hands and squeezed his eyes shut.

She could kill him like this, if she wanted to. He couldn’t make himself open his eyes. He sat there with her in the cool air of the barn, feeling the ache in his chest. Savoring the air in his lungs. Savoring his life.

Her sobs faded to hitched whimpers. Her whimpers faded to slow, shivering breaths. She raised her eyes and looked at Gavin. For once, for the first time, her eyes weren’t dark with hate and mistrust. She stared at him with fragile, questioning vulnerability. Her gaze landed on his throat, on the scratch there.

Her eyes went wide with horror. She cringed into herself and dragged in a shuddering gasp.

“Oh, no,” she whispered. “N-no, I…��

Gavin swallowed hard. “What?”

“Isaac,” she whimpered. “Isaac’s going to kill me.”

Gavin’s brow furrowed. “What… Edrissa, why?”

She raised a shaking hand to her neck. “I… He… he’s going to, to know that I… and then he…” She pressed her hand to her mouth and sobbed helplessly, her eyes wide and staring at nothing. “He… he’s going to… he almost did, be, before…”

“No,” Gavin croaked, rubbing harder at the scratch. The skin didn’t even feel broken. “No, he’s not.”

“He will,” Edrissa whispered into her hand. “When he comes back. I… both the cars are gone, I can’t… can’t run…”

“He’s not going to kill you, Edrissa,” Gavin said softly. “Because he’s not like that.”

“Y-yes he is,” she said through her teeth, her eyes desperate. “He… he’s a killer.”

Gavin’s throat bobbed. His lips trembled, and he pressed them together. “Well… yeah. He is. But he won’t kill you. You’re in the family. And he won’t know, because—”

“He will—”

“—I’m not going to tell him.”

Edrissa caught her breath and raised her eyes, fogged with terror, to Gavin’s. “What?” she whispered.

Gavin chewed his lip. “I’m not going to tell him. He doesn’t need to know. Nothing happened, right?”

Edrissa stared at Gavin, trembling, her mouth slightly open. “I… what?”

Gavin shrugged jerkily. “Nothing happened. We talked. We figured some shit out. Right? Nothing bad happened.”

Edrissa’s hand drifted to her neck. “But you—”

“That could have happened so many different ways,” Gavin said, his voice tight. “Shaving accident. Picked up the cat and he didn’t like it. Walked into a door.” His lips pulled into a half-smile. “Or I don’t have to say anything.”

“H-he’ll ask—”

“So what if he does? Edrissa…” She went still at her name. He shook his head. “I’m not… g-going to let… anything bad, um, happen. To you.”

Her lips twisted in an echo of bitterness.

Gavin hung his head. “Okay… yeah. Bad choice of words. All I’m saying is…” He held up his hands in a placating gesture. “I’m not going to tell Isaac what happened. And even if he knew, he wouldn’t kill you. I mean…” Gavin laughed, dryly. “After everything I’ve done to him…”

“But it’s different,” she mumbled. “Because you’re…”

“Yeah,” Gavin said with a heavy breath. “Because we.”

They were both silent for a long time. Finally, Gavin stirred. “Um… do you want some… some breakfast? Or tea? Or… I can make eggs benedict—”

“No thank you,” Edrissa said quietly, her eyes cast down to the floor.

Gavin’s shoulders slumped. “Right. Um, well… I’m… kind of hungry. I want to go make something. Will you… are you… okay?”

She wiped her nose and glanced up at him. “Yeah.”

Gavin held still. “Okay. Can you… not try to kill me again?”

Edrissa barked out a painful-sounding laugh. “Yeah.”

Gavin bit his lip. “…promise?”

She tossed her head and tucked her hair behind her ears. “Yeah,” she murmured. “Promise.”

“Okay,” Gavin breathed. “Can I… g-get the steak knife, then?”

She glanced into the corner where Gavin tossed it. “Yeah. I’ll, um… I’ll come inside in a while. I just want to be alone right, um, right now.”

“Okay.” Gavin got to his feet and fell a step back from her. “Um… I… I h-heard you made some, um, really good tea for Ellis. Can I, um, have some?”

She tipped her head back and raised an eyebrow. “I know it was for you. I’m not an idiot.”

Gavin blanched. “Oh. Right. Um…” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “Well, thanks for not, um, poisoning it or something.”

Edrissa looked at him impassively for a moment. “Yeah,” she finally whispered.

“Okay, well… I guess I’ll… go.” He turned and shuffled towards the barn door. On his way out, he stooped and picked up the knife.

“Thank you,” Edrissa called out behind him, tears tight in her voice.

“Yeah,” he rasped. “Thank you, too.”

Continued here

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my-emotional-self · 4 years ago

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Toxic Love Chapter 8

Pairings: Steve Rogers x Reader, Bucky Barnes x Reader, Steve Rogers x Reader x Bucky Barnes

A/N: There will be no taglist for this story! I apologize in advance!

Lucky for you, Darcy was in the communal kitchen when you went down for lunch later that day. You had asked if she wanted to get out of the tower and do some shopping and she happily agreed.

Sending off a quick message to Steve and Bucky, the two of you headed out. It was decided that walking would be best instead of driving. The fresh air would be nice.

Naturally you found out Darcy was a little nosey, but you couldn’t help but laugh when she asked what medications you took after picking them up. “Just vitamins really,” you lied with a smile.

The two of you went to a few shops and you picked up a cute black leather cross body purse with little spike details on them along with a new pair of sunglasses. After that, you two headed to lunch.

“I have to ask,” Darcy began to say after the waiter left with your food orders, “just how big are they?” You assumed she was talking about Steve and Bucky, but you were confused at her question and you cocked your head to the side. “You know,” she said, using her hands as reference.

“Darcy, what are you talking about?” you giggled out your response.

“They give off big dick energy if you know what I mean,” she spoke so casually.

Your eyes widened when you finally realized what she was talking about. “Darcy!” you whisper screamed.

“What? A girl can be curious can’t she?”

You shook your head at her words, trying not to break out in hysterics. “I wouldn’t know. I’ve only known them for a few weeks and I just moved in a few days ago.”

“Well, I’m here for you when you are ready to discuss that.”

~~~

As you got back to the apartment, Steve was sitting on the couch watching the news. He turned his head to face you when he saw you walking out of the elevator.

“Did you have a fun time with Darcy?”

A smile crept onto your lips at remembering your conversation with Darcy earlier at lunch.

“Mmhmm. It was nice to get outside and to stretch my legs a bit.”

Dropping your purse onto the kitchen counter with your medication discreetly tucked safe inside, you sat down next to him on the couch. Steve wrapped his right arm around your shoulders and pulled you closer to him. He smelt so good, like cinnamon and pine trees.

“I’m glad you had fun. Bucky will be here soon and he’s going to cook dinner for us tonight.”

You weren’t overly hungry after having just ate lunch a few hours ago, but you were excited to have a nice quiet evening, just the three of you.

“Did you get off early today?” you asked with curiosity.

“Yeah. We’ve got to leave tomorrow for a mission so Fury gave us the rest of the day off. Bucky’s down working out right now.”

As he spoke, you couldn’t help but stare at his mouth. His top lip was nearly covered by the mustache of his beard while his lower plump lip looked delicious enough to nibble on. Without even thinking, you ran your hands through his beard.

“Are you ever going to shave this off?”

He chuckled at your words. “I might. Why? Do you not like it?” he asked as he turned to face you.

“No, I do. I actually really like it. I was just wondering what it would be like to kiss you without your beard.”

His lips parted at your words as his eyes glanced down to your lips. The two of you stayed that way for the briefest of moments before you practically pounced on him. Throwing your leg over his hips, you straddled him as your lips connected once again. Steve’s lips against yours felt like heaven. Pure euphoria. The man knew how to kiss.

Your hands gripped the back of his hair, pushing him closer to you. Steve’s hands were at your waist at first, but slowly moved back to your ass, squeezing roughly. You gasped into his mouth and you knew that was his intended purpose. His tongue conquered your mouth, causing you to moan. And that little moan of yours sent off a chain reaction. Steve’s hips bucked upwards and you felt him growing hard beneath you. Your hips ground down onto him, grinding back and forth over his length.

“Steve,” his name a mere whisper as his lips travelled down your throat and to your collarbone. He nipped it with his teeth before leaving a scorching path of hot breath and wet saliva up to your throat and then he hit your sweet spot. Right at your pulse point, he latched on with his mouth, sucking furiously and you damn well knew there was going to be a hickey the size of a fucking dinner plate.

Your nails scratched his scalp and you heard the most delicious moan come from his lips. You never wanted it to end. You wanted this to keep going. As your hips kept grinding back and forth, you felt an orgasm approaching. Steve sucked harder as his hips continued to thrust upwards, his hard cock straining in his jeans against your soft black leggings.

“I’m….I’m gonna….” But before you could finish your sentence, the elevator pinged. You and Steve immediately stilled all movement; the brink of your orgasm fading quickly away as Bucky cleared his throat.

“Did I interrupt something?” he asked with a devilish grin, looking between you and Steve.

“Great timing Buck,” Steve growled out.

Bucky couldn’t help but laugh as he headed into the kitchen and started taking out the ingredients for dinner.

“Sorry sweetheart,” Steve said before giving you a chaste kiss on the lips. He helped you off of him and before you could say anything, he got off the couch and walked towards the hallway as he adjusted himself in his pants.

~~~

“So, what are you making for dinner?” you asked Bucky as you hopped up on the kitchen counter and watched him work. Steve had to go talk to Fury at the last minute about the upcoming mission so you decided to keep Bucky company in the kitchen.

“Ma’s famous spaghetti and meatballs,” he replied as he started molding the two pounds of meat into meatballs.

Not wanting to get your hair in any of the food, you took the hair tie from around your wrist and piled your hair into a messy bun at the top of your head. As you watched his hands work effortlessly, you didn’t notice Bucky staring at your neck.

“He got you good didn’t he?” he stated with a grin, nodding his head to your neck.

“Are you jealous Bucky?” you teased him back, nudging his arm with your elbow.

He shook his head, a soft snicker coming from his mouth as he rinsed his hands off with soap and water before moving the meatballs into the pan.

You had come to realize that you loved watching him in the kitchen. He moved about so easily, almost as if he was dancing. He really knew what he was doing.

Before you knew it, he was standing in between your legs; his arms on either side of your thighs, caging you in. His blue eyes zeroed in on the hickey Steve gave you, inspecting it closely.

“I’m not jealous doll. Stevie and I are on the same playing field. You are ours. Both of ours and we know how to share.” His face now in front of yours, noses nearly touching as you inhaled his scent. Like Steve, he had a woodsy smell to him, but instead of cinnamon, he smelt of mint. Mint and woods.

His blue eyes locked with yours and your breathing became ragged. Bucky moved closer, but instead of his lips meeting yours, he turned his head at the last minute and his mouth latched onto your neck. Tilting your head back, you let out a breathy moan. You knew what he was doing; cheeky bastard. He was giving you a hickey on the opposite side of your neck from where Steve left his mark.

Your legs came up to wrap around him, pushing his hips closer to yours and you immediately felt the bulge forming in his pants. “Oh Bucky,” you mewled as he hit a particularly sensitive part of your neck, sucking vigorously. The familiar twinge of an oncoming orgasm was starting to build and you were more worked up than ever, especially since you never full got off when you were hot and heavy with Steve earlier.

As Bucky’s lips remained attached to your neck, you felt his metal arm drop to your thigh. His fingers began trailing up and down your inner thigh; small gasps and moans continue to flood out of your mouth. As his fingers trailed closer to where you wanted him to touch you, you felt like you were going to burst. You knew with just one soft touch of his metal fingers you would be sent over the edge.

But it didn’t happen. Just as his fingers were mere millimeters away, Steve cleared his throat. Bucky let go of your skin with a pop; his lips red and swollen from his ministrations. “Sorry doll. Stevie has bad timing,” he said before giving your lips a quick kiss.

He went back to cooking as Steve tried to hide his smile the best he could.

“UGH!” you screeched as you hopped off the counter and began to march towards your room. “You are BOTH cock blockers!”

~~~

The following morning you were saying goodbye to Steve and Bucky. They had both apologized for the previous night and you were still peeved. Not about the hickeys. No. You loved that they had each marked you. You were pissed about nearly orgasming with both of them and then each of them cock blocking you. Assholes. You were so wound up, it took everything in you to not get yourself off that night, but one of your rules was not to touch yourself. So instead, you stood under a cold shower for you don’t even know how long.

Steve gave you a kiss on your forehead. “Now be good. The rules especially apply while we are gone.”

You nodded your head in understand. Bucky gave you a kiss on the cheek. “Please be a good girl for us and stay out of trouble.”

Shaking your head, you let out a laugh. “How can I get into trouble when your taking all the trouble with you.”

“Very funny,” Steve said as he hit the button to the elevator. You watched as both men climbed inside.

As the doors began to close, you spoke, “Please be careful.”

#steve rogers x reader #steve rogers x you #steve rogers smut #steve rogers fanfiction #steve rogers fanfic #bucky barnes x reader #bucky barnes x you #bucky barnes fanfic #bucky barnes fanfiction #bucky barnes smut #dark!steve rogers #dark! steve rogers

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your-brilliant-lady-m · 4 years ago

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South Korean music industry at a glance: an outsider perspective

I watched one particular AMV last week. The song used for the video was “I’m afraid” by Korean rock band DAY6. I was pleasantly surprised as someone who values lyrics in song first and foremost. The music itself was great. I’ll listen to their songs again. It’s a nice fit for my music taste. Naturally, YouTube’s algorithm decided that I’m a fan of everything Korean after 1 video and started spamming my recommendations with k-pop songs, documentaries and everything in-between.

I watched a couple of videos, listened to some songs and discovered fascinating patterns. So, I went down to the comment section. And it was rather interesting experience, should I say? The concept of entertainment industry in South Korea simply begged to be explored more after this. I dug deeper and visited Tumblr k-pop tags and briefly glanced upon Instagram and Twitter. And, oh...

I am a big picture person and I enjoy both studying and creating systems. This one was particularly fun to explore. I discovered a lot of new things for myself. Perhaps, you can discover something new for yourself too or take a step back and look at this from a new angle.

Disclaimer: it’s impossible not to offend someone on Tumblr, so keep that in mind. That being said, I do NOT intend to insult of offend anyone. It’s just a little research done for fun, because I love research with a purpose. This post is NOT A HATE post. No hate intended for fans, artists or other people involved. It’s meant to be a discussion, nothing more and nothing less. If it sounds like hate, it’s just my sarcastic sense of humour.

Content Warning: I mention suicide, death, depression, rape in a couple of sentences. There’s nothing major or graphic, but it’s there.

In this long post I decided to share with you my opinion, a so-called outsider perspective, on the world of music entertainment industry in South Korea and people involved in it on different levels. I use the word “outsider” mainly because, that’s exactly what I am in this case, as someone who is in no way involved in k-pop community. I can’t name you a single band or their members. I don’t know any solo artist and can’t neither sing nor name you any song.

And to be completely honest, I don’t think I will set my foot into k-pop fan-circles ever again after everything I saw.

Think of this as “In this essay I will...” meme, except there’s an actual essay.

As far as I know, in South Korea “k-pop” refers to all music produced in SK, including solo artists, various bands, singers-songwriters. It doesn’t even have to be pop music. Koreans include in this definition all genres of music. However, around the world “k-pop” means primarily music made by idol groups and bands marketed for children, teenagers and younger people. In this post I use the latter definition, because that’s how most people understand “k-pop” in other countries. Therefore, my statements, opinions and conclusions here would concern only idol music.

The music industry in South Korea is heavily influenced by culture and traditions of the country, just like all things are. And there’s nothing wrong with that. After all, different backgrounds are what makes people so interesting and unique. However, when combined with consumer mindset, desire to generate profit at any cost and fast-paced nature of modern life these neutral cultural elements could produce something concerning, and it can lead to disastrous consequences.

1. Idol

These people are called artists, musicians, singers, bands, groups, performers. In South Korea and in Japan, however, people call them Idols or Stars. I’ve also seen Muses, Princes and Queens. Interesting, isn’t it? The terminology used to describe these musicians in South Korea is one of the key elements in this whole entertainment system. You’ll see why.

But who or what is an idol exactly? Let’s take a basic definition from Wikipedia.

“In the practice of religion, a cult image or devotional image is a human-made object that is venerated or worshipped for the deity, person, spirit or daemon ... that it embodies or represents. In several traditions, including the ancient religions of Egypt, Greece and Rome, and modern Hinduism, cult images in a temple may undergo a daily routine of being washed, dressed, and having food left for them. Processions outside the temple on special feast days are often a feature. Religious images cover a wider range of all types of images made with a religious purpose, subject, or connection. In many contexts "cult image" specifically means the most important image in a temple, kept in an inner space, as opposed to what may be many other images decorating the temple.

The term idol is often synonymous with worship cult image. In cultures where idolatry is not viewed negatively, the word idol is not generally seen as pejorative, such as in Indian English.”

Cambridge Dictionary defines idol as follows:

And here’s the definition from Oxford Dictionary:

This is a centrepiece of this tapestry. Surely, you have noticed by now what these definitions have in common.

Idol = a cult image of a god, a deity

By calling these musicians “idols” industry makes society and audience treat them in certain way, namely as gods. What characteristics do gods possess? They are beautiful, talented, funny, confident and graceful, blessed by eternal youth of immortality. Gods have no flaws, they do not bleed, they are above human concerns. They are an embodiment of perfection. They are stars, you could not reach.

But real people are not like that. They can be sad and angry, insecure. People don’t have perfectly symmetrical faces. They can’t dance in sync without preparation. They can’t sing like angels at any given moment throughout the day.

What happens when idols accidentally reveal their humanity? What happens when people see, that they make mistakes and do stupid things, that they need to train hard to appear graceful on stage?

I will tell you. And it’s not pretty. But, first, let’s look at other elements of this system.

2. Y/N and Self-insert fantasy

Aside from the music, K-pop sells the self-insert fantasy to the audience. It’s carefully arranged to appear real, where the cracks are masked and every word is scripted. The reality is so vivid that one doesn’t even have to use imagination all that much, because all scenarios and decorations already exist. Countless interviews for TV and magazines, fan meetings, talk shows, reality shows made sure people are privy to all juicy details of personal lives and opinions of musicians. And also one word - merchandise. Some of that merch made me question my life choices. Some of it is, ah, creepy or has weird vibes. All of this provides plenty of material for people to work with. Fans can effortlessly imagine themselves beside their idols or even in their place.

In a highly competitive society, where people throw themselves into studying and work since young age, forming deep and lasting connections with others is very hard, sometimes impossible. As a result, people long to have a group of close friends with similar interests, a loving partner who would cherish them endlessly. People want to be rewarded for their backbreaking efforts to succeed by the carefree life of fame and music, everlasting friendships and love. And in a way you can’t really blame them for his.

Does this dream life sound familiar? We are looking at K-pop bands here. It doesn’t really matter if their members don’t always get along or that they can live in debt, that fame is fickle and adoring fans can tear your self-confidence to shreds. Audience wants the glamour of fantasy and the industry is more than happy to cater to these desires.

Perhaps, knowing that even for idols this fantasy is sometimes unattainable makes the whole set up feel just a little cruel.

3. Fans, stans and fandom culture

We’ve already established earlier that idols are gods in the eyes of people and listed traits they must possess. So, what else do gods need to exist? Worshippers. Because a cult is worth nothing without its followers. Gods need a group of people to worship them and spread their beliefs. The role of worshippers is performed by a fans in this case.

Apparently, there is a running joke that girl groups need to win a general public popularity and boy bands need a big passionate fandom. It seems to be true according to my observations.

In k-pop fandom people use the word “stan” to state that they like or support particular group. Now, I am sure everyone here knows that in other fandoms, dedicated to movies, shows, books and games there’s an important distinction between being a “fan” and a “stan”. What is it?

A fan is someone who likes a ship or character, creates and/or consumes fandom content, supports certain ideas, discusses things they enjoyed and disliked, criticises canon. Stans, however, are a different breed. They engage in all typical fandom activities, but their support and enjoyment becomes obsession. Stans believe their favourite characters and ships are immune to criticism, that they are superior no matter what others say. Stans start shipping wars, send anon hate, death threats over fictional characters and hurt real people. Stans are considered toxic fans. And majority of normal civilised people don’t like them and try their best to let stans hang out in their echo chamber by themselves.

In other fandoms and communities, to be a fan means to love, support and enjoy something, while to stan means to obsess over and hyperfixate on these same things. Words “I stan” rarely mean “I support” for most people, and if they do mean that, it’s only used in a joking manner (”We stan procrastination legend!”, “I stan our miscommunication kings”).

Everywhere else “stan” has only negative connotations, except in k-pop. But what has changed? What’s the difference? Why do international fans scoff at “shipper stans” and then turn around calling themselves “stans of X k-pop group” at the same time? Does it make you wonder?

And this is another core theme of k-pop, in my opinion. In fandom where stan = obsession = support, you can see interesting patterns.

Fandom loves their flawless gods. But watching them from afar is not enough for some people, because unlike deities in different religions, these gods live among us. People are very much aware of that. Industry has created a cult and laid the groundwork for worshippers to express their adoration in every way including personal contact. And who wouldn’t want to meet their god? Who wouldn’t want to know more about them or tell them how much you love them? In talk shows and fan meetings there is only so much one can do after all.

People desire to know more, to have more so much that their obsession transforms into concerning stalker tendencies. These crazy individuals follow idols, stalk them on social media, in hotels, research flight numbers, bribe security. Musicians were attacked and poisoned. I strongly suspect there were cases of rape that no one knows about. There is even a special term for these fans - “sasaeng”.

Is there a definition for stalkers of actors or musicians in western world? No, I’m pretty sure there isn’t. They are just called “invasive/obsessive fans” or “stalkers”.

Also, there are sasaeng memes. Yeah, you heard that right. I enjoy some classy dark humour as much as the next person, but there is a fine line between normal and questionable.

Back to the topic of stalkers. Do you realise how disturbing that is? Such behaviour is so common that there is a term for it. You create a fandom-cult, encourage people to worship k-pop idols as gods and then act surprised when members of said cult become fanatics and their adoration becomes obsession.

And it’s so easy to step on this slippery road. The system makes it ridiculously easy. Lines begin to blur. How much is too much? Where do you draw the line?

While sasaeng fans engage in extreme real-life obsession, people online aren’t that far off, to be honest. I’ve seen it all: imagines, headcanons, fanfiction, real-person shipping, reactions. Real person shipping is a controversial topic. Some people support it, others don’t. I suppose I’m among those who don’t get it. I’m not exactly against it, but I find it strange. Mainly because it’s based on assumptions made by fans about personalities and behaviour of real people.

Assumptions. Dear me! K-pop fandom has this thing with video compilations. I’ve never seen this phenomenon being so widespread in any other community or fandom. Basically people edit together a collection of short clips from talk-shows, interviews, Instagram stories, some YouTube videos, etc and then proceed to analyse every gesture, word, facial expression of idols and provide both audio and on-screen commentary. These videos and many other forms of similar analysis allow people to imagine what kind of personalities idols have, what kind of life do they live. It’s the source material for fanfiction, imagines and headcanons.

But it’s not real. It’ll never be real. It’s an illusion, an image, a stage persona. They fall in love with a face and made up personality. And I think that when people create this content they can forget this. Fans can develop certain emotional dependence and unhealthy attitudes in the long run. In some YouTube comments even supportive and encouraging words sound whiny and obsessive. And semantics of being a “stan” of certain group or individual doesn’t help.

4. Industry, companies and liars

At last we arrive at the most important aspect of music entertainment industry - its creators.

Have you seen “The Road to El Dorado”? It’s one of my all time favourites. It has iconic characters, adult jokes that I didn’t get as a child and iconic soundtrack. I’ll quote “It’s Tough To Be A God” a lot here.

In South Korea music industry is a factory, the production line to be exact. This kind of set up affects everything in the grand scheme of things. Companies and agencies play the role of training centres and record labels. And there are so many of them that a whole new scamming system developed based around fake idol agencies. It implies that there are people who fall for offers of these agencies and continue to do so. I suspect that victims must pay a fortune upfront before they realise their mistake. Are there any kind of legal protection against such scams? How can people verify the authenticity? Because a well masked scam can exist for a long time before someone discovers it and calls them out on their nonsense.

As far as I understand legal companies work like this. After high school, which is often focused on performing arts (and private schools can get away with using talents of students for personal gain, which is totally not surprising), young people can audition for an agency and become an idol in training or idol-trainee. And passing audition is hard. But good recommendations can help, connections too.

During training you don’t get paid. Only a few companies pay aspiring musicians. People can spend years in training and don’t debut. But rent, necessities, clothing and food (not that you need much of it, but more on that later) cost a lot. Where do you get the money to live then? Support from parents, one or two part time jobs at most and bank loans. Surprise! We found an unexpected (just kidding, it’s very obvious) party, who reaps benefits from the system.

You need skill to be an idol. Natural talent helps too. The more skills you have, the cheaper and faster your training is. To level up your game you attend classes every month offered by your agency, which are not cheap (dance classes range from 400$ to 1000$ per month, sometimes more). There are four main categories in evaluation process: vocals, rapping, dancing and visuals. Idols are multitaskers, to have a chance on stage one must be perfect at everything. And people are ready to invest thousands of dollars into their kids training so that they could have a chance in entertainment industry. South Korea thrives on revenue k-pop industry generates every day.

Let’s pause here for a second and think about what kind of people come to these agencies. The answer is easy. People who have a dream, a desire, a real goal. You don’t wake up one day and decide to become a k-pop idol. Sometimes people get invited by agencies (after prior acting, modelling career or any other form of exposure). These people are usually very young. Some start straight after high school, some after university, but 25 years old is considered a late start. Compare that to western musicians who start singing at any age and still become famous.

But why this age limit? Because idols are eternally young. So that in public eye musicians are remembered as 20 year old gods. People would listen to their music and imagine a young attractive face. Career in k-pop is short, it lasts 5-7 years, rarely longer than that. It’s even less than modelling or acting can offer. And professional sportsmen retire in their late 30′s. Some play longer, but usually, that’s it.

If you live in Los Angeles and say that you want to be an actor or performer, no one would bat an eye. It’s like saying that you want to be an engineer or accountant. Similarly, in South Korea becoming an k-pop musician is a real career. Because part of the self insert fantasy that the industry sells is the idea that anyone can be an idol. It’s easy after all. Anyone can pass auditions and become a trainee. A trainee with no guarantee of debut. But one should never underestimate the power of idol-dream. After all, idea is the most resilient parasite.

“My friends started training in kindergarten. They have wanted to become idols since young”

“A lot of young kids get interested in Korean music”

A 6-year old child sees the performance of k-pop group for the first time on TV. Let’s say it’s a girl. She is enraptured and decides that she will be like that too someday. She grows up, while being part of the fandom, just like all idols are in one way or another and whose fan-obsession transforms into desire to succeed. Her parents spend time and money to find her tutors, to fund dancing and singing classes. Perhaps in high school this girl decides to fix the shape of her eyes and make nose straighter. She trains hard and passes the auditions in her dream agency. And during training this girl faces the reality of behind the scenes life in music industry.

“Why are you crying? I’m not even pushing you”

“How many times have I told you? The rest are doing it perfectly”

“She is dancing like an elementary school student“

“I watched your performance as a spectator who bought a ticket to your concert. I want a refund“

“You make my ears hurt. I don’t want to listen at all”

“Listening to you was tiring”

“I’ll kick you out instead. You won’t debut”

“I thought I was going to die. That’s how determined I was”

While I do understand that keeping a high quality standards in media industry is important, there are more productive and healthy ways to motivate someone to improve and be more passionate, you know? Constantly insulting people with sadistic glee and putting them down at every opportunity or calling them ugly to their face doesn’t do much.

Do you think that children know about this? Do they know about soulless teachers and belittling managers? Do they know about friends who are really your competition, so you shouldn’t get attached? Do they know about living in debt? Do they know any of this? No, I don’t think they do.

Children dream about the stage, about the sea of lights and crowds who chant your names. They want adoring fans and photoshoots. They want to appear on TV and magazine covers. Teenagers want the thrill of performance, they want to share their music and dancing with others.

“I don’t know how many times I cried alone”

The truth is cruel. But they won’t give up easily even if it means sleeping 4-5 hours and consuming no more than 500 calories per day. Because giving up means that your whole life was a lie. One can’t afford not to be good enough. Giving up means admitting that all efforts and money your family invested into your dream were in vain. It means losing face before your family and friends - a fate worse than death. Imagine living this idol dream and building your whole future around it and then being told that you’ll never debut because of the circumstances outside of your control or something minor, like face shape or 1 kg of weight that your body refuses to lose. It can break you. Especially if you are like 18 or something.

5. “And who am I to bridle if I'm forced to be an idol If they say that I'm a God, that's what I am”

“I don’t think there’s anything a tough as being a trainee in Korea”

Once you are a trainee at the agency your personal life does not belong to you anymore. You can’t go out without permission of the agency. You phone is taken away. Your diet and weight are monitored. Bad habits are not allowed (no smoking, drinking or drugs). Oh! I think I found the good thing in the system! Unfortunately, it won’t last. Trainees can’t date or meet with family without permission of agency. Dating is very taboo. Even established idols can’t openly date.

Why is that? Because gods can’t belong to anyone. Their lives are property of the fandom. Because openly dating idols destroy the self-insert fantasy. There was a former idol girl who dated another musician. She was called a whore by her fans, her loving and adoring stans. You might know who I am talking about. Would you call an American actor or singer a prostitute for dating someone?

Trainees sign the contract. And how can a young person straight out of school or university know much about what makes a good contract in entertainment industry or what makes a good contract in general? Even if you do understand the terms fully you would still sign it because if you have come so far, you can’t let your dream slip this easily. There isn’t a choice. Not really. If you want to debut, you will agree to anything.

What about life after debut? You have to pay off your loans. And company takes 60-70% of your group’s earnings. Artists themselves get 30-40% and split it between themselves. K-pop groups have from 5 to 10 members or more than that. Each person gets less than 6%. Idols are not filthy rich. They are not. These earnings are practically nothing compared to the work you have put into this.

Idols are musicians, who often don’t even write their own songs, music or create choreography. But if public doesn’t like the song and musical number the company created, they blame idols for the failure. Such an amazing logic we see right here. But people say that sharing music is the best part of idol life. But whose music?

Models on catwalk are not there to demonstrate their physical beauty, they are blank canvas for works of clothing designers. Same with k-pop musicians. They act like puppets in a way, whose faces and voices are used to show audience someone’s music and songs. Some groups do write their own music and lyrics and it’s nice to know that. But those, who don’t are rather unfortunate. It’s a nice tool of psychological control and pressure for an agency. They can hold it over group and use the following rhetoric: “We gave you everything! Why can’t you follow the simple instructions” or “Where would you be without us? It’s not even your music!”

I called k-pop industry a factory. That’s true. Dozens of people become trainees every year. These talented young people are fully prepared to do anything to achieve their goal. They are ready to practice until they collapse, starve themselves and pour themselves into every song. Companies know that. Tell me why would they value their idols as individuals, as people, as human beings if they always have a replacement? Why bother with mental health of their artists if next year they could have a fresh set of people, who are younger and prettier? Why try to improve relationships inside groups if you could fire any member and replace them within a month or two?

In western countries famous bands have different stories. Some were friends since high school, who played in bars and during festivals and then they were noticed by some representative of label company, who offered them a contract. Some groups were formed by like-minded people who bonded and decided to share their music with the world. There are many stories, but ultimately the have one thing in common. Bands in the West often form themselves. These people had time to bond, connect, discover each other, solve some disagreements and learn to work around their differences.

K-pop groups are formed by their agencies. They are their property in a way. Company selects the best and puts together these total strangers, appoints the leader with marketable face and personality and then expects them to work together like a well-oiled machine. No one has time to bond during training, because other people are you competition, not friends. And then you must learn to work as a team and be best friends on camera for the audience to support the self-insert fantasy. It’s no wonder that k-pop groups don’t get along sometimes. And every member knows that they are replaceable. It doesn’t help in forming connections. Groups can’t just terminate contract and go to work with another agency. I heard it happens sometimes, but it’s not a done thing. Unlike in other countries where bands just sign the deal with a different label and release their music under their name if they don’t like the old conditions.

“It's tough to be a God But if you get the people's nod Count your blessings, keep them sweet, that's our advice Be a symbol of perfection Be a legend, be a cult Take their praise, take a collection As the multitudes exalt Don a supernatural habit We'd be crazy not to grab it So sign up two new Gods for paradise”

But is it really a paradise?

Idols are expected to act cute, to match personalities created for them by fans or media. They have to act according to the concept of their group. They have to be a symbol of perfection: skinny, single and with a face perfected by surgery. They are allowed to mess up, but only in a cute way. They can break down and cry, but only if it’s “aesthetic”.

Weight issues are a separate topic. Sometimes I wonder whether managers in companies understand how weight loss or human body in general works. To be honest, I think that scales in agencies are rigged. And only managers know that. I know it can be done from personal experience. Some beach resorts tweak their scales and make them show 4-6 kg less than actual weight, so people wouldn’t get upset if they gain some. There is no way a girl as tall as I am (173 cm) could weigh like 47-50 kg and be able to perform complex choreography on stage and sing without being out of breath, visit the gym on a regular basis and generally function as a normal human without fainting every other day.

“I developed a lot of eating disorders”

“I think I consumed about 300 calories today“

“Someone, please, trim the fat off her arms”

If you grow up thinking of idols as gods and then, when you become one of them you think that you must act as one too. But being an easily replaceable god is a heavy burden. The industry, companies and audience want you to be perfect, to always be on your best behaviour. And the thought of not being good enough or divine enough terrifies you, because stans have no mercy (black ocean concept is the most stupid thing ever by the way). This kind of pressure can destroy even the most resilient. And it does.

Almost everyone knows that situation with mental health in South Korea is not the best to put it lightly. In many ways it’s a cultural thing. But in k-pop mental health issues are treated with even less care. Gods are not supposed to be depressed or suicidal. They are not supposed to have fears or insecurities, can’t be upset or angry. They try hard to be this deity, this image. So, even when they realise they need professional help or even a friend to talk to, they either won’t seek said help or reach out only to be met with silence. Some agencies disapprove or forbid therapy altogether.

Sometimes fandom becomes self-aware.

“Don’t forget that idols are people too!”

“Your favourite idols are running out of breath just to keep you entertained“

“They are humans, who have feelings!”

Oh, but here’s the thing, my friend. The industry doesn’t want you to think of them as people. Companies and media repeatedly reinforce the idea that they are not people, they are your idols. And strangely enough, the audience supports this idea. People continue to call them idols, developing worshiping tendencies in the process, imitate them, scrutinise their flaws and triumphs. Because, you know, only “real and ordinary humans” can have flaws, not “idols”.

So people who say “they are human too” and people who say “wow, this concert was amazing, but vocals in the beginning were so off-key, I simply can’t” are one and the same.

This thought process would have been funny if it wasn’t so disappointing. But that’s just my observation.

And here’s another thing about sexualisation. I said before how appearances are everything, marketable face and body could drastically improve your chances to succeed. Companies know about this too and concepts and aesthetics of groups are designed accordingly. Girls are dressed in skimpy outfits, their dances are unnecessary suggestive, they wear heavy make up and try to have “mature” vibes. Boys don’t avoid such objectification either: suits, tight pants and dress shirts along with make up and hairstyle to give audience a promise of the things to come. Grown adults are not supposed to lust after 15-17 year olds. You can’t just create a sexy stage persona for teenagers. Do you remember my earlier words about creepy merch? Yeah. All of it neatly plays into the self-insert fantasy and encourages obsessive behaviour.

This happens in western countries too. In some way that’s understandable. Beautiful and sexy image with a hint of innocence attracts more people and sells, because it caters to one of the base human instincts. But some things make your skin crawl.

Sponsorships are another topic. Some k-pop bands seek out sponsors to provide financial aid and cover expenses, when earnings are not enough. Sometimes these sponsorships are fine, perfectly civil. But sometimes it’s a prostitution. Girl groups receive money and provide sexual favours to their patrons. It’s a way for the group to gain financial support and even find new opportunities in the industry. Companies can encourage such deals. Let that sink in for a moment.

6. “Any advice to those who want to become a k-pop idol?”

A lot of former idols and trainees have similar responses to this question.

“I don’t want to discourage anyone, but think twice”

“You only see the glamorous side, but don’t see all the hard work that goes into it”

“It’s not what you think”

“They think ‘Since I am good looking and can sing and dance really well, maybe I should become an idol?’, but there is much more to it“

“They think it’s something that is easy and will keep their family set for life financially”

And this implies that most people don’t know what kind of lifestyle k-pop stars truly have, despite the amount of information available online about “behind the scenes” proceedings.

7. Moving on

I am a practical person and every decision I make is subjected to scrutiny. And after seeing everything I can't help but wonder whether idols believe it's truly worth it. What keeps the industry alive is the idol-dream, the wilful ignorance of its reality and youthful idealism, the beautiful naïve belief that it'll get better, even if it never does in the end.

Sure no one would ever admit it out loud, because it's one of those things you never say on camera, no matter how sincere you have to be. It's the matter of professionalism after all, and idols have it spades. And also, because admitting this would equal admitting that you spent your best years doing something you both loved and hated, admitting that this was a mistake.

When you grow up in a society where appearances matter the most, where saving face and being polite is more important than staying true to yourself, where individuality is tolerated only to a certain point, it takes a lot of courage to admit that you need a break. I greatly respect those who decided that idol lifestyle is not for them and moved on.

8. Conclusion

To sum up, I hope you enjoyed my small research and this perspective, since you have read it all the way to the end.

You have noticed that entertainment industry is an intricate system and its every component makes sure nothing changes. Companies have power over idols and audience, fandom has power over idols and their careers, and musicians themselves have fame and their music, but not always the promised fortune or happiness.

It’s important to understand the big picture to draw your own conclusions and encourage positive and heathy attitudes in fandoms. Being open minded and allowing people to make mistakes and live their lives the way they want to is a part of being a decent person. People don’t owe anything to others. Art is about sharing your thoughts and feelings, promoting ideas and spreading beauty. It’s not always about money. And I think that this is what k-pop lacks as an industry. It turned dreams and human need for self-expression into business. Here everything is turned into a product. Everything idols touch can be sold, sometimes literally. Industry created problems, which can’t be solved anymore, because doing so would topple the system. And I find it tragic. Trapped in an endless chase after perfection creators of k-pop forgot that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder.

If you take a look at comment sections and posts on different platforms, what will you see? What kind of things resonate with audience? What makes people laugh and cry? When people start to appreciate the substance?

“Everyone needs to hear this song in their darkest moments”

“Thank you for your music!”

“They always deliver! These guys can’t make a bad song!”

“It inspired me to write again!”

“Their songs brought me and my sister together once again”

“This is what happens when you let groups write their own music - they make incredible things”

“They really are legends of k-pop! I love that they are not afraid to show their inner strength”

“Stay strong! You rock!”

I believe that the answer is quite simple: when it’s real, sincere. It’s all about the message you choose to send to your audience, because only superficial things cause obsession. When you say that the sparkly façade is all that matters, then that’s the only thing people will ever care about. Your audience will never give a damn about the meaning behind dancing, music or lyrics, if you tell them that performance is more important. No one would praise WHAT k-pop idols sing, instead they would prefer wasting breath to criticize HOW they sing or look or move.

I dare the k-pop industry to prove people that it’s not just about looks or perfection, or laser shows, or being a branding machine. Prove to your fans that k-pop artists are also passionate people with big dreams and talent, who love every moment of their job, who live and inspire, who are human just like us and whose humanity is real!

Do it, you cowards!

And now, I’m finished. I can hear the raging crowd of k-pop fandom in the distance, which means it’s time to hide. See you some other time!

#k-pop #korean music #k-rock #k-pop idol #k-pop meta #k-pop discussion #k-pop fandom criticism

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