#crazy wild and cannot blame him

[shehungthemoon]

I thought that man looked "hungry" from that first glance while he was pressed all up like a noir girl against the firetruck 😭

“I’m gonna study you tip to tail” sir, you sound like you want Bobby to fuck you (valid)

[unknownarmageddon]

Okay hi I’m being very annoying about the Deja Vu AU right now but. As time gets reset more and more do you think Cross would start losing it and hallucinating seeing blood on himself. So he slowly begins wearing darker and darker clothes to cover it up and “hide” the blood stains (they don’t exist). And after long enough he’d go from no gloves to partial gloves to full gloves because the sight of his hands is too much because he can so clearly see the blood on the white of his bones. So at the beginning of the AU he’s a combination of blacks and whites and lighter colors and tends to wear whatever but at the end he’s fully covered head to toe in blacks and greys with the only bone exposed being his face

OHHHH MY GOD. solluna your brain. what the hell

i’m obsessed with that actually that’s so real christ

i think he wouldnt go anywhere near mirrors too. because maybe the resets get so blurred in his mind at a point that whatever he sees in them is him at a point in the loop he never wants to see; he has to see himself scared, running, covered in blood, red and blue lights bathing his back. and in a mirror he would be able to actually see the blood he imagines on his face, the last part he can’t cover up

and do you think he would hallucinate blood on killer, too. because he can’t do anything about what killer wears. do you think after a point, the next time the loop starts over and he sees killer again, he sees him covered in blood. but he can’t do anything about it. maybe he tries, but killer just brushes him off like he’s acting weird. so he has to see flashes of killer stained with blood (both his own and someone else’s) over and over again, both real and the products of his own mind.

[reignpage]

Lil angst idea ........ how do you think jjk men would react if reader defected?? (If possible could we get both pre and post defection suguru 👉👈)

Gojo:

DEVASTATED words cannot even explain the crash out this man would experience (I have a fic on this actually, still writing it tho) I think he'd go off the rails Starts hollow purpling everything That isn't a joke btw, like that's how I see it play out He'd lose hope and faith

Pre-Geto:

He'd go catatonic for a while Thinking about what went wrong and trying to figure out where he stands But he'd end up joining reader

Post-Geto:

Happy Feels reassured about his masterplan Because he definitely had moments where he doubted himself

Choso:

Confused Would try to reach out to understand Would be very conflicted about where he stands It'll drive him wild trying to choose between reader or his brother Very similar crash out like when he realised Yuji was his brother after attacking him

Toji:

I don't think he'd care He's really the type to just go with the flow Always been apolitical and just focused on himself so he'll go wherever you go Won't really take an active part in your plans but if you asked him to do something e.g. kill someone, he'd do it

Nanami:

Woah You know in a zombie apocalypse, where the crazy weirdo has a tied up zombie of their loved one that they talk to and think is genuinely okay, like living in fantasy land That would be Nanami He'd be sent to kill you, but would capture and hold you captive instead Comes in multiple times a day to clean and feed you Talks to you about his day like nothing's wrong In hopes you'll return to him

Sukuna:

He'll pat himself on the back lol You know that scene in Barbie when Ken says SUBLIME Yeah that's our man

Yuji:

Poor boy wouldn't understand He'll be traumatised Forever changed Just like Gojo was It'll force him to reaffirm his belief and faith in jujutsu society but there'll be a darkness that follows him everywhere

Megumi:

Mad at you So so so mad Mad at himself too Feels a strong sense of responsibility and blame Thinks you're stupid and you were manipulated or something But doesn't try to seek you out He's too cowardly

Inumaki:

Suffer in silence Would stop speaking all together Might start chasing you down though Thinks he can use his technique to bring you back Spiritually demolished if he tries and fails

[diorcities]

⠀   ⠀ ── ꪔ̤̥ ꪔ̤̮ ꪔ̤̫ nct dream on did you just . . . !

SMUT

mark has trouble sleeping every night due to his heavy workdays. his body seems to possess enough energy to keep him awake even when you know he's exhausted. so you ride him, slow, passionate. in search of his tense body to relax enough and he can go to the planet of dreams. howling him with the swing of your pelvis against his, rolling his length with your pussy while his hands venture to your breasts, pinching your erect nipples. but he's now more awake than ever.

seeing you so majestic, on top of him, your holy beauty, he cannot believe you're his. with your soft skin, and your soft breasts where he wants to dig his teeth. mark everything and show off as a trophy with others. feeling your pussy take him so well, fucking him so well. squeezing and clenching in intervals against his cock, wrapping yourself so tightly around his length, hearing the lewd movement of your pussy when he penetrates you.

mark looks at you from below with frowning eyebrows and shiny eyes, and a tingling sensation overwhelms you from head to toe, pulling your head back when pleasure runs through you and fills you with bliss, before you feel him pushing deeper and starting to pulse. you stop moving on top of him as he frees himself inside the condom while his fingers bury themselves in your hips, then his cheeks turn with blush as he realizes he was very, very fast. “did you just cum?”

long make-out sessions with chenle surely will drive you crazy. feeling his firm hands on your jaw so your head stays still, drinking your moans as his tongue swirl with yours. warm and sharpy breath hitting your face when he speeds up the pace of his rough thrusts, forcing you to wrap your legs behind his back while he shoves it in and out, sensing your narrow walls wrapping his dick just right. “look at you, so dumb for my cock,” he says with a sharpy breath while pounding you and sending you to subspace.

you are in a pure state of ecstasy, trying to soothe the knot in your stomach that grips your crotch. moaning and whining to release the fire that burns your insides, your nails bury themselves in the fresh skin of his back, and chenle growls, feeling the fissures that appease the wild feeling of seeing you under him so beautiful, watching your eyes roll when the intensity of his hammering increases, feeling your walls pulsate erratically.

your body aches when a flare of pleasure takes your breath away and your mind fogs up. a silky sensation melts in your belly and is released in pulsations outside of you, “o-oh, shit,” you scream, feeling him tense and slow his thrust until it's just a swing of hips against yours. you drown out a wail and open your eyes, gazing at chenle and the stars dancing around him, looking at the place where your bodies connect. “well, look at that,” he sighs, “did you just squirt?”

there is something fascinating about jeno after he trains. he comes overflowing with an essence when he gets covered in sweat that stirs your senses. you can blame your lunar cycle for that; you've always been fond of astrology, but there was a more raw feeling, of seeing him sweating while relentlessly fucking you that had nothing to do with your lunar humors. he looks at you in surprise when you drag him after he's showered to his computer chair, pulling down his pajama shorts and being surprised to see his cock ready for you. “i was also thinking about you, my love.”

jeno suppresses a hiss when he sees you stuff it full into your warm, moist mouth. sensing your delicate fingers feel the base and massage it while you go up to the tip and roll your tongue into his slit. sensitive endings cause him to startle in the seat and his features contract, and you smile with his cock still in your mouth, at knowing that. you savor his soft, thick cock under his gaze.

fleshy lips girding around his girth, tongue flat against his length, teeth rubbing against the sensitive skin, making the hiss finally come out of his lips. “f-fuck, doll. did you just bite it?”

your body twists beneath renjun as he penetrates you rhythmically, and your heartbeat does not take long to catch up, feeling him hammer you slow and deep, your body plunges into a wave of pleasure that leaves you numb and breathless. his cock buries itself and you drown out a scream, jaw tense as your head lolls back and your body arches towards him with an invisible force. completely in limbo, you try to avoid breaking free because it feels so good. filling you with pleasure with an overwhelming sensation that causes you to look at him while you free your climax.

renjun feels your walls wrapping him tighter and pulse as orgasm bathes your features. and you've never looked that breathtaking. noticing your legs wrapping around his waist so he can bury deeper and touch that sweet spot that makes you see stars and bite your lips the way you're doing right now.

your body undergoes spasms that decrease more and more until the sensation that squeezes your stomach is released and extinguished, leaving you craving for more. you spread your shaking legs for him in time when your eyes open to see him with his phone pointed at his cock still buried inside you. you exhale a laugh before he hovers over you and resumes the enveloping movement of his pelvis, “did you just take a picture?” he throws one of your legs over his shoulder and kisses you with passion, “can you blame me if i did when you look so good fucked?”

haechan leaves your body vibrating and in limbo to hover over you and draw a path of wet kisses from your stomach to your crotch. his hands wrap around your ankles and force you to flex your numb legs, opening them to position himself between them. you feel his hot breath in your intimacy before he traces circles with his wet tongue over your swollen pussy, licking the cum from your pussy, and pushing the rest with his fingers back inside. you bite your lips at the overwhelming sensation that takes your breath away, still sensitive, burying your fingers in his brown curls while he buries his inside you.

he laughs, seeing the effect he has on you. completely dazed by the way he fucks you. tasting so good after he made sure you cum enough times to be this brainwashed. seeing your body contorted twitching while covered in sweat that he sure licked. now, your silky arousal sends him towards the edge of jubilee, sweet, while his available hand squeezes and feels your belly vibrate when he licks your clit and shoves his fingers into you. “you look craving, baby,” he says in a moan.

his mouth leaves your intimacy and you already long for him, pulling you out of your slumber to see him direct his teeth towards the soft skin of your thigh. you drown out a hiss that sends a torrent of pleasure that eventually releases around your fingers. you could ask him but your tongue feels heavy and your throat pasty, but, did he just bite you?

your body tries to react to stimuli but you can't do it, letting jaemin use your body as he pleases, putting you in the positions he likes best, becoming his fuckdoll. feeling his arms hold you and forcing you to arch your back again whenever your shaky body hits the mattress, completely ecstatic at the way his cock expands your sensitive, throbbing walls for another round. cock hammering relentlessly, taking your breath away and clouding your senses.

jaemin sees you, and feels you around his cock, pulsing. watching your body succumb to his girth burying him and stimulating your intimacy even more. small hands making fists the sheets under your bodies. he wants to be so rough with you, just so you can scream and roll your eyes like that more. feeling your epitome slide and wet his dick tingling to break free inside you. covered with your silkiness and precum that forms a nice creamy ring at the base of his girth. pressing his palm to bend you more, he speeds up ecstatic at the sight of your butt trembling from his frantic thrusts. mesmerized that he doesn't realize that the firm grip on his wrist loosens after he feels your walls clenching again. so he hovers over you without stopping his ruthless motion to check on you.

he looks your drowsy eyes blink and your mouth spilling a silent pant, “did you just faint, princess?”

jisung shifts over you, burying his face in the crook of your neck. you feel him breathe your scent as he pushes his pelvis in, dick shoving deeper. you suppress a groan. eyes rolling back from the smooth sensation exploding in your belly. jisung and you moan in unison. running his hands below your knees, he bends his arm and pulls your legs, shorting the minimum distance separating your bodies. his pleading eyes gleam because of his cock being stimulated by you constantly clenching around him. his eyes close, squeezes, and hiss. he's so close. but not yet, seems to say your actions when you caress his hair. he pulls you closer into a kiss, and it seems to say, please, not yet.

jisung feels a blaze of fire tense his stomach and descend like a stream of pleasure to his nerve endings. staring into your eyes, watching you roll your eyes and moan that way while his cock pounds you mercilessly, hard and increasing the intensity at times, and slow and deep, rocking his hip against you, making you sigh as his world spins. he cannot hold back anymore. your walls wrapped around him, feeling you completely raw, he can't help but accelerate his thrusts and make you scream.

he shifts again, to gain more control. pushing against you, making you sigh and see constellations. arching your back in an involuntary movement of your body because you can't contain yourself, not when he's fucking you this good. a sweet sensation spills into you, and you hear jisung growl. “shit, sorry, baby.” but your head's in space and you barely connect dots when your body freezes and you writhe under his grip, releasing the euphoria in spasms, now feeling it gushing out. “did you just came inside?”

[littlesmartart]

DRAWTOBER #5 - two bowls shatters loneliness and melancholy by @spinecorset

Lan Xichen is wearing sea-dark robes. Settled at his guqin across from Jin Guangyao, bathed in light that makes the silver-threaded clouds and eddies that swirl delicately and yet with surety across the understated fabric spark and glimmer, eyes half-mast as his slender fingers pick across the strings, the length of his neck accentuated by how his hair has slipped from his shoulders and spilt down the stretch of his spine, he looks like something out of a painting, or perhaps one of Jin Guangyao’s carefully hidden fantasies. He pays attention to the notes, carefully reproduces them, but his mind is—elsewhere. He cannot be blamed—if asked, he would merely say he was admiring his sworn brother’s famed beauty, and this is true, but only inasmuch as an apple is part of an orchard. Instead, his mind—the one weapon he has honed since his youth, what has helped him survive through the furious whirl of public rumour mills, of Wen Ruohan’s inner court, of the pit of vipers he now faces among the wider gentry as the bastard Jin—spins, like a top let loose, string pulled too violently, gone wild and swaying sharply, held upright only by the force of its movement. - AKA Lan Xichen seduces Jin Guangyao with fashion: the fic.

this is such a hilarious execution of an attempt to justify LXC's Fuck Me Robes and it's thoroughly entertaining reading poor JGY do his best not to dissolve into a horny mess whilst the two of them play Cleansing for NMJ. I love any fic where LXC gets to be a little bit schemey, a little bit cheeky, and be sexy on purpose, and this one is a very fun read through LXC's sartorial seduction attempts! it could perhaps be renamed "5 times Lan Xichen drove Jin Guangyao slightly crazy by how sexy he is + 1 time Jin Guangyao (very smugly) returned the favour" 😌

[alicerosejensen]

Tags: Dad!Leon(Older), Leon is the girl's father; fluff.

Warning: There are none.

He was really afraid of becoming a father. It's not so much the news of your pregnancy that scares him, but the likelihood that an innocent child may be harmed. His child. Leon is paranoid to worry about you and the baby. He'll probably get drunk before he puts that thought in his head. Don't get him wrong, he wants a family, he had plans after completing the police academy to get married in a few years and have two children, he still wants a family, but his fear devours this desire entirely because he knows that if something happens to the child and you one day, he just won't survive it.

It takes two to tango so I don't think he'll start getting angry and blaming you for everything. Leon just needs a little time, but when this happens and he thinks it over, he will want to transport you to some place that he thinks is safe.

You might have to get into a long debate with him, but this guy doesn't want anything like the Winters family to happen to his family. If someone kidnaps his child, he will simply go wild.

Due to the fact that he is a government agent, all information about you is classified. Also, if a bioterrorist attack suddenly occurs, you will be quickly evacuated along with your child. At least that's what Leon wants to believe.

The house will be nice and simple (perhaps like the Baker's house but without additional extensions) I think Leon likes something classic and cozy rather than modern and abstract. It is unlikely that you will be against it, especially since he does not skimp on quality items and excellent appliances.

Your child will definitely have a great room at all stages of growing up. But when the baby is born, Leon will still insist that the baby girl sleep next to him and with you for the first time. He would have put her in the middle of the bed, but since it was not safe, he agreed to just put the crib on his side. He's just calmer that way.

“Look, I found a catalog with a whole selection of cribs. There are different options, classic, round, even some very strange ones, what position should the child lie in?”

You will laugh, but in the end you will find the right option. Not too expensive, but first you need to explain to Leon that the baby in the first months of life will definitely not be whimsical in which bed he sleeps on. Leon, of course, knows this, as well as the fact that many of the toys that he has already ordered will not be needed by his daughter until at least six months, but he cannot do anything about it.

Choosing a name is a whole challenge. You two will have a debate about this when you find out the gender of the baby. Leon will want a simple name and will roll his eyes when you read him rare names from your notebook.

"Laura, Mary, Ashley, Sarah, Jessica, Kate? These names are for weaklings! Need something crazy and original, right?"

It will really be difficult, but he will win and his daughter will have a normal name.

When his baby is born and Leon holds her for the first time… you will see tears running down his cheeks. He would have kissed this pink, swaddled bundle of joy, but he just sat there, held her in his arms and cried from the fact that he was now the father of a little girl.

This girl will be lucky as hell. Her father would literally give her the whole world at her whim so you're a little worried that she might grow up spoiled. However, while she is a baby, your only problem is the fact that your daughter loves to be held in her arms because Leon constantly carries her around the house, showing her things and telling her some stories.

Leon will wake up at the first cry and immediately try to calm her down. Change a diaper? hungry? If you are not breastfeeding, Leon will easily prepare the formula and feed her. Sometimes you think that he is a better mother than you.

The best toys, a special children's area when your daughter begins to explore the world around her, beautiful and comfortable onesies. Your daughter will definitely have a bodysuit with the inscription "daddy's princess"

A stern special agent in the White House and on missions, Leon becomes an affectionate bear at home.

He is a truly caring dad. Watching cartoons with her, coloring coloring books, playing games when she grows up. This child is the only person who can attack him from behind and Leon’s reflexes simply won’t work.

Often he needs your help and advice on what to do best. He will especially need your help when her first childhood love and first broken heart happen. Because he can get really angry at anyone who causes his baby any pain. He really doesn’t understand how it’s possible not to love her, but more on that later.

At the age of 3-6 years, Leon can only be seriously shocked by some accidental injury or illness. Be serious but he will panic even if it is a common cold. You will have to work hard so that he doesn’t drop all his business and take your daughter straight to the doctors for all the examinations. Of course, you will dissuade him, but he will repeatedly check the baby while she is in bed. He will kiss her on the forehead and lie with her for a while so that she does not worry (even if she was initially calm). It would also literally break his heart if Leon heard you sneeze.

She will definitely be daddy's princess. She almost literally walks on his head, does her dad's hair with pink bobby pins and combs his bangs, and paints his nails with polish. Leon allows her to do almost everything to him. But of course he won't come to work with pink nail polish.

Support any hobby. It could be dancing, drawing or playing football. The main thing is that she likes it herself.

What Leon definitely won’t allow is to look into his safe where he stores weapons and ammunition. The password will be complex and only he will know it. This is one of the few things that Leon forbids his child.

He, of course, loves his baby and is ready to do anything for her, but… he won’t have a second child. Every time he returns home, a terrible thought comes to his mind: “What if something terrible happens to my family.” He often has a nightmare in which you and your daughter have turned into zombies, so he will need a drink.

I think one day, when your daughter woke up, she left her room and went down to the first floor, holding in her hands the plush bunny with whom she usually sleeps. She saw her father sitting at the table with a bottle of whiskey as he simply looked thoughtfully into his glass.

Leon, of course, immediately noticed her and looked at her. God, tears will immediately flow from his eyes when he stretches out his hands to her and your daughter runs to him. His arms wrap her tightly in his arms and pull her onto his lap. You will see this picture and the perplexed look of children's blue eyes turned to you when your husband is just sitting at the table, holding his beloved child and crying because he is fucking AFRAID!

You understand why Leon behaves this way. He finds it difficult to get rid of these thoughts because of his job. He survived Raccoon City, Tall Oaks, saved the president's daughter in Spain from parasite-infected fanatics, and a whole bunch of other crap that you probably don't even know about. He has every reason to be afraid and sometimes you regret that you did this to him. Although you know that Leon loves your daughter with him, the very thought that something like this will happen to her simply destroys him to the core.

Your little girl wipes the tears from his cheeks and kisses her daddy on the cheek, telling him that he doesn’t need to cry. Leon simply presses her too tightly, feeling her scent. If he could put an end to zombies and their creators once and for all…

Leon will take her and you back to the bedroom. Next to the two of you, he will be able to sleep a little peacefully, but you know that his sleep is never sound.

You try to talk to him but he pushes you away. He really loves you, but he hates it when people mess with his brain. Of course, whiskey is a bad medicine and Leon himself does not want his daughter to find out that her dad sometimes has the weakness to drink, thereby ignoring his problems, but still… no matter how hard he tries to be perfect, he is not perfect.

When your daughter goes to school, Leon will rejoice at any of her successes. She will also help with homework as much as needed. He will explain everything in detail, clearly and without shouting (sorry, this is a sore subject for me).

He will not always be able to attend school events, unlike you, but if possible he will not miss them. However, he asks you to record everything on camera.

Oh yes, on his desk at home there is a framed family photo of the three of you in the park, joyful and carefree.

So, adolescence is…complicated. Leon understands that his baby will begin to grow up and has no problem organizing small changes in her room. And he also understands that hormones are coming into play. Sometimes screams and anger accompanied by loud slamming of the door are simply inevitable.

That's the time when he can really start to get angry and swear in response, so you realize you need to cool his temperament… The truth is that you really have to punish your daughter when she crosses all boundaries.

Nevertheless, if something suddenly happens, she will always run to Leon, knowing that he will protect her. He may be angry, but as mentioned above, he will do everything possible so that nothing happens to his family.

Partying with friends at night? Absolutely not! Never! Have pity on the old man's heart. Leon will find a bunch of reasons not to let her go anywhere at night. After all, there will be alcohol, shitty guys who can offend her or get her drunk and take advantage of this by ruining her life. Perhaps Leon will exaggerate, but until the age of 16 he will definitely be adamant about this. Sometimes being the daughter of a government agent just isn't possible.

And then, before letting her go to the party, he will sit her down on the sofa and give her a long lecture, telling her to always watch her drink, drink only what she pours for herself or is poured in front of her. If are distracted, do not drink under any circumstances, but take another glass! If someone pesters her, he will show several self-defense techniques and immediately tell to call him. Well, the cherry on the cake - he still won’t allow her to stay there all night. He also won’t bother with calls, but she will need to respond to all his SMS, if not… he will come right away.

Even you yourself will get tired of this overprotection, realizing that Leon often goes too far.

But you ask your daughter to be more lenient towards her father, because he is simply worried about her life. However, when you are young and have not seen what Leon saw, it is difficult to understand his actions and behavior.

There will be conflicts and there will be a lot of them.

The only thing that can make your daughter understand the actions of her father is if someone kidnaps her and confronts her with the infected, forcing her father to go to another wilderness inhabited by the infected. (bad version of events).

Leon will immediately go after her, promising you that he will return her safe and sound. He remembers how he saved Ashley, but she was already an adult girl and not a teenager who, at most, had seen horror films on TV.

Leon, like Barry or Ethan, is ready to kick the ass of any bastard who hurts his baby. In any case, he will do everything to save her.

I imagine this concept as a teenage girl hiding behind her father's back, holding on to his kurta or vest while he shoots enemies, sometimes throwing improvised objects like bottles or stones, stunning the opponents.

After returning home, she will hug you tightly and cry for the hundredth time, promising her father that she will no longer contradict him.

There is no need to say what condition Leon himself will be in after this personal rescue mission. All three of you will experience extreme stress after what happened.

In a good scenario, bypassing the kidnapping, peace between father and daughter would most likely have come much later, when the teenage years would have been long behind us. Probably this realization would have come to her when her naive view of the world ceased to be naive and she began to understand what her father had been struggling with for many years.

Oh yes, about first love. Leon would definitely be vigilant and keep a close eye on everything. He has a whole database and he will immediately run through all the boy’s data, having learned everything about him, and yet he doesn’t really like the idea that some dubious guy is hunting for his daughter.

If Leon realizes that this is an ordinary bastard who runs after every skirt… well, he will find a way to take him away from his treasure. If not and he's just a normal guy… he'll just watch and give a couple of warnings.

The first parting… Leon consoles as best he can, but he has no idea what to do. He himself got drunk and slept through his first day of work, but this option is definitely not suitable. That's why he needs your help again.

"Movies, books, maybe give her something? What can I do to stop her crying into her pillow?! I don't know what else to tell her!"

In the end, he will gain strength and give a good speech, comforting your daughter's broken heart. After all, life does not end with one boy who, in Leon’s opinion, only proved that he is not worthy of his daughter.

He's a good dad. Not ideal, but your daughter wouldn't want it any other way. Of course, she is sad that he may not be home for a long time and sometimes he is too suspicious, but he is her dad who will move the earth for her.

[behoright]

boyfriend! braden schneider in bed

the way nobody asked for this….. go blame @hoesforthecanes

warnings: smut and sexual situations obvi. 18+! onlyyy

- dsjfhksdf SO

- sweet boy Braden

- the most monogamous person sorry

- he loves that you’re his girl and his girl only

- in every sense

- very protective a lil jealous

- nothing that guys can’t talk about but yes it does bother him if other men look at you because

- “you’re mine.”

- not necessarily in an aggressive way but he’s very territorial let’s say

- oh but he has the biggest heart eyes for you

- he wanted to make sure he really really liked you before trying anything

- like the fact that you’re his girlfriend turns him tf ON

- so yes he did make sure to ask you to be his girl properly and directly

- and yes he did wait until then to take you to bed

- and he is so sweet

- melts in your mouth sweet

- i feel like he’s sort of always staring at you a lil bit

- but when he wants you

- he CANNOT take his eyes off you

- wherever you guys are you will feel him staring, burning into you

- if you ask him anything ???? The lights are on but there’s no one home

- he can only say yes or no

- “You… alright, babe?”

- and he just nods slowly and he keeps studying your face

- thinking about all the ways he can have you

- the wheels are just endlessly turning in there

- like you KNOW you have to go home because this man has tuned everything out

- if you don’t go home soon enough he’ll start to get touchy

- like veeeeery touchy

- he does not! Care! He will straight up grope you in public

- squeeze your ass while his body is fully against you….

-…. At the grocery store. He cannot compute anything but you rn

- in bed he’s really just as tender

- he really loves slow sex especially after a date or something

- Braden like to soak up everything when you guys are together

- no pun intended

- he loves sex w you and he’s very present for every single moment

- more of a sensual person than a sexual one tbh

- he does love to be inside you but also everything else that hints or regards sex drives him crazy

- so he can make out with you for hours

- he loves it when it’s slow and romantic or hard and sloppy and needy

- he loves feeling his tongue run against yours like there’s something about that

- it makes his cock so hard so quick

- when you run your hands on his skin

- like if you rub his thighs or his hips it makes him crazy

- he loves it when you grind against him too

- or feeling your underwear soak through ???? Oof

- you’ve made out while just touching each other over your underwear for hoursss

- a big big talker

- you cannot quiet him down in the bedroom

- words just come out of him

- whether he’s fucking you or eating you out or whatever it is

- LOOOVES to talk into your skin

- “You’re so pretty when you moan like that.”

- talks into your pussy constantly

- literally with spit dribbling from his lips

- “You’re so fucking gorgeous. you taste so good, baby, it drives me wild.”

-“i can feel you pulsating against my tongue, my girl.”

- loves to praise but ummm loves to be praised more

- if you tell him he’s doing a good job…. Game over

- it turns him on so much that his whole body twitches as his cock gets harder

- it’s almost too much to take for him

- he gets lightheaded seriously

- whenever you tell him how good he’s making you feel/how good it feels/etc

- he squeezes his eyes tight tight

- because he doesn’t want to be distracted by anything and just focus on your words and the pleasure

- “you’re so good to me, B. No one has ever made me feel like this.”

- if you keep the talk going he starts to shake

- like telling Braden that he played well when you meet him outside of the locker room is dangeroussss

- he’d get so blushy jskdfhklasjd

- foreplay is his thing

- there’s been times that you two have cum multiple times simply from playing with each other

- and he’s so good with that

- 69…. A favorite of his

- he likes it that you guys touch each other at the same time

- all of this meaning that you guys can go at it all night

- def loses track of time buried in between your legs

- and he LOVES to cum more than once

- he figured out if he can get past the initial overstimulation it feels so good to cum again

- he’s figured out a way to have a good pace when you guys fuck or play so that you’re both at the edge of overstimulation but not there and it’s titillating

- sex is always always always hours long he’s not a guy that messes with quickies

- it’s sacred time between you two

- if he goes in with heart eyes he comes out of it with even bigger feelings for you. The goal is always to bring you guys closer no matter what the physical outcome is

- his kryptonite is teasing tho

- he’s the most needy when he’s horny

- teasing would drive him insane

- he has this insane belief that maybe if he waits it out he will feel less horny

- but it never happens that way. The more he waits the harder he gets

- until his cock is so swollen

- like a dark, deep red, throbbing swollen

- that he can’t take it anymore

- he doesn’t like to take anything from you but he’ll def voice it

- “baby, please, let’s go home”

- “I fucking need you so bad”

- “you want to feel what you’re doing to me? Touch it, baby, no one’s looking right now.”

- all muttered in your ear while he checks around

- and when he’s needy he gets

- whimpery

- any little touch or praise makes him whimper

- audibly !

- or groan too. Like the deepest groan

- that being said

- when he’s traveling…. His biggest nightmare

- porn will simply not do it for him he could care less about any random ass video

- he loves getting nudes from you but will never ever ever ask

- he needs your FaceTime dates

- NEEDS them

- or he loses it

- mentally he’s not there without the daily FaceTimes

- this man is so golden retriever cute he’ll set up his phone and everything

- he was actually really shy to ask you first so you guys had a talk about it

- the first roadies you’d send each other snapchats with the audio ON

- the amount of snaps you’ve gotten that the camera is shaky because he’s coming so hard but he still tries to keep it in focus :’)

- until one day he just FaceTimed you

- “baby, I just, I fucking miss you so much, I’m going to explode.”

- “look how fucking hard you made me, and you’re not even here.”

- and he’s fully naked on the hotel bed flushed flushed flushed and sweaty

- “nothing will do it, baby, I need you. i need to see you, please.”

- so whiny it’s endearing

- you stripped for him and touched yourself on FaceTime and he came so so quickly

- so now it’s kinda exciting when he goes on trips because you know it’ll be a lil different in the best way possible

- when he gets really desperate he-

- “I’m going to fly you out, fuck, I don’t fucking care. I’m flying you out, I need to touch you.”

- while he’s pumping at his cock so feverishly

- his legs twitch too and seeing every muscle move involuntarily while he grinds up into his hand…

- makes you lose it

- being in the hotel does not stop the talk

- “Can I see you? let me see, doll.”

- “Please touch yourself for me, baby. Look how pretty your pussy is, god.”

- “I’ve been edging all day for you, baby.”

- “i can’t wait to see you, princess, i can’t wait to be inside you again.”

- and when he cums

- oh

- it’s like the world shakes

- his head fully goes back into his pillow

- eyes fluttering stuck on the ceiling

- mouth slack open

- and the loudest, deepest groan you’ve ever heard

- he does not give a shit about any chirps

- like not only single fuck given

- it just feels too good

- giggles after he cums kfhaskjfh

- 10/10 you guys

[beenbaanbuun]

i think i sent you a request sometime earlier and if you didn't want to answer it that's totally fine!! you can look past this one as well if that was the case!!

but i'm still thinking about mingi bringing you to his studio to keep him company while he works and then he gets distracted by your presence and just ends up eating you out and fucking you on the couch there 🫣

mingi just being obsessed with his partner and everything about them makes me go a little crazy

also hope your hangover isn't too bad! take care <3

ah! no you deffo did send it and i meant to answer but i just got sidetracked 😭😭 like it’s literally half written in my drafts but imma just go ahead and freehand it now bc this is way too good not to talk about…

like he definitely takes you to the studio with the intention of doing work and he definitely has to tell you to behave before he even starts working but like… how are you supposed to behave when your hot boyfriend is literally right there?? so he can hardly blame you when you start doing things to tease him.

like imagine you just start moaning a little, and when he turns to you with a cocked brow and a scowl on his face, you tell him the couch is uncomfy and the moans are because your back hurts. if you want to push it a little, you might even ask him if you can sit on his lap instead. and obviously because mingi can’t say no to you he just rolls his eyes and pats his legs.

but then when you’re sat with your ass against his half-hard crotch, you can’t help but tease him a little by rolling your hips. obviously he tries to ignore you and get on with whatever he’s doing, but you can feel his dick getting harder with every roll of your hips, and you can hear the little grunts he lets out every so often.

it doesn’t take much to push him over the edge, and when you do, he’s lifting you up and literally throwing you down onto the couch. like you don’t even have a second to think before his hands are tugging at your jeans and your panties, and his lips are attaching themselves to your clit.

and while he’s eating you out like you’re his last meal, he can’t help but literally moan into your pussy. it almost feels like he’s getting more pleasure out of this than you are, which should be impossible because he has your thighs shaking in seconds. like, you cannot tell me he doesn’t know what to do with his tongue because that man 100% does. he’ll have you cumming in record time, and then carry on for more.

and i’m a firm believer in the fact that he is insatiable when it comes to eating pussy. he’d be down there, slurping and moaning and just making the most vulgar sounds known to man forever if you’d let him. but obviously overstimulation is a thing, and eventually you have to push him away for a breather. but i can that guarantee that even when you’re literally on the verge of passing out, this man will find some way to complain about wanting more.

but when he realises just how tired you are, he realises maybe you’re right and maybe he can’t just carry on eating you out until he himself is satisfied. so instead, in the softest voice he can muster - as if he hasn’t just been ravaging your pussy like a wild animal - he asks if he can fuck you. he’s fumbling over his words and fiddling with his fingers and practically begging you to let him fuck you, all while your juices are spread over his mouth and chin.

and you say yes, because you’re not evil, and he just smiles at you. doesn’t even bother to take his sweats off, just pushes them down to let his dick spring free before railing you into the couch. i can guarantee he tries to start off soft but the man has zero self restraint and actually ends up fucking you so incredibly hard that you’re seeing stars.

but he’s still so kind and so mingi with it because he knows you’re overstimulated, but he still feels like he can’t just fuck you and not let you cum, so he asks you if you want to. the second he sees you nod your head, he starts to play with your clit, but it’s so gentle compared to his thrusts because he knows you won’t need much to cum this time around.

and he’s absolutely right because his finger is barely on you before you’re squeezing tightly around him and creaming over his dick. and seeing your face screw up at the same time is all he needs for his own hips to stutter to a standstill as he releases his load into you…

[mannatea]

part 2 finally

first all, put your hands together for the real queen, serra. she manages to be both the most annoying character in the entire game and also the most versatile. she really can do it all. she has the range!!!

erk is honestly the whiniest little bitch. boi, sit down...a queen is sPEAKING

(i'm sorta kidding. serra is the worst. but also? his level 1 ass is getting paid real money. he needs to sit down and shut up. dorcas would never complain like this. erky, you need some real problems.)

i want to fault serra for this but i truly cannot. she's no fool.

it's goofy as hell but i really like the worldbuilding info dumps for my own selfish purposes. it helps that they work here since lyn is new to all this, though.

terrifying, when you think about it. i wonder if they remain friends after this or if lyn, kent, and sain never tell hausen what happened in araphen.

i would have screenshot A LOT MORE than this but my husband was watching me play and i didn't want to look completely unhinged. just the usual amount. you know what i'm saying.

this is WILD. but also how did lyn get in, then? lol. must not be looking that closely. (and I KNOW I KNOW, people are always remarking that she looks like her mom. BUT...hear me out.

i gotta say rath is pretty cool. i never really thought too much about his time in araphen but as captain of the guard he has to have like?? some crazy qualifications.

also the fact that he thinks lyn is sacaean from a distance but doesn't continue to believe it up close is SUPER weird. she's literally dressed in traditional garb. if she obviously had a cloak or something that hid her somewhat, i could buy into that but it's like, rath thinks immediately that she's not sacaean enough to pass? and then two seconds later marquess araphen is like ew she's so tainted with the blood of sacae like

GUYS WHICH IS IT

this is rhetorical question obviously, because the answer is undoubtedly that being half lycian and half sacaean, she can't win on either side. 😭

this could also be 50% blamed on kent standing with her (lycian knight) calling her "milady" which might have just made rath second guess himself.

I LOVE THIS CHAPTER SOOO MUCH (AND I LOVE KENT). i can't evennnn. first of all, in the previous chapter, kent expressed some annoyance toward sain about staying in an inn and lyn told him plainly that an inn was fine and he instantly accepts her word as gospel, which. we loooove to see a faithful guy.

at the beginning of this chapter, kent comes back with positive news about having secured aid and apologizes for the hardships lyn has so far endured, to which she says, "Don't be silly. You are so capable, Kent."

ok ok okKKAAAYY LYN. sain gets jealous of kent getting the attention which is honestly super funny but let's be real kent deserves a little praise!!

shortly after this, rath saves lyn's life, and in return lyn offers help in routing the enemy...because they were actually after her. kent doesn't disagree but "... ..." doesn't sound very enthusiastic either. truthfully though, i always interpreted this as him being concerned by this happening at all. someone legit just tried to assassinate lyn in broad daylight. and they even accosted marquess araphen? like...this is getting more serious and dire all the time.

anyway after all that bullshit they finally see the marquess and he's a fucking ASSHOLE.

what really gets me about this whole thing is that he pulls his offer and when kent gets upset about this "you gave me your word, my lord!" he's like hmmm well you forgot to inform me of one most VITAL detail!!!!

and kent has NO IDEA WHAT HE IS TALKING ABOUT. OR COULD BE TALKING ABOUT. because he's not a jackass who thought what lyn looked like mattered that much.

the way marquess araphen keeps talking to kent about this is WILD. "i didn't expect to see her so tainted with the blood of sacae." brother WHAT. "don't you feel the marquess of caelin would be troubled to meet this...nomadic mongrel?" HUHHHH??? you just know kent is like wtf am i supposed to say to that????? What

but sain... my boi my guy. sain gets mad about it right away. (thank you sain.)

anyway i like that kent holds sain back here (honestly it's good he did) but it really sucks that he pleads for aid again. if we take the game script at face value he's definitely doing this specifically because he feels they very seriously need the help to ensure a safe journey. alas araphen is a jackass who knows lundgren is vile and welp, if he takes over soon...he doesn't want to be on lundgren's shit list.

(understandable, i daresay.)

((you know some kind of fe7 lyn's story AU where lundgren succeeds in killing hausen and then starts trying to conquer other lycian nations could be preeeeetty sick. ignore me. i'm delusional. but only somewhat. uther and matthew seem to think that left unchecked lundgren could be trouble even for ostia.))

ANYWAY ANYWAY, after this, i love that the first thing out of kent's mouth is a heartfelt apology for not considering her feelings more. and lyn's like...is that it? "trouble yourself no more. you have put my safety above all else. i have seen that. hold your head up and be proud." this moves him a bit and i love that for kent.

but then.

i love kent. he's a favorite. goshshhhhh i mean he's doing his best. he always tries really hard to do right by her. but let's be real: he's one guy and he can't do it all alone. so it's understandable that sometimes he has to be the voice of reason.

--

ALSO when rath joins up (thank u rath, u deserve better than to serve a scumbag anyway) he gives the party money and says: "i cannot take back something once offered."

hmmm is this some sacaean thing? perhapsies?

--

Teehee you have no idea. this chapter pretty much shows kent already learning and growing. he's very clear that he thinks they shouldn't stop to tarry here because marquess hausen is ill and abed, but he's talking to sain--and lyn's response is to say she wants to help. AND HE STOPS. AND HE LISTENS TO HER. and she apologizes to him????

which i don't think i ever thought much of before, but it's nice that, while he is making a greater effort to consider her feelings, she is also doing the same thing for him. <3

(shut up it's not just the shipper tee-hees okay okay okay.)

anyway, kent just accepts this immediately. "i am your loyal retainer. you owe me no apologies. you must do as your heart dictates, milady. i will follow you, no matter where that may lead." sir please i need you to chill for one second YOU ARE NOT AT YOUR A SUPPORT WITH HER YET YOU KNOW.

--

i think the "get the ring back" sidequest is kind of silly but if it wasn't a long detour it seems reasonable enough. i could see lyn wanting to help ninian but i don't think she's agree to unless it wasn't too far out of the way and/or kent and mark thought it was a good idea to prevent the people who took it from ambushing them later (which could be possible!) sadly the game doesn't really go into that though.

why is beyard kinda hot tho?

also i do like that this game does quite a bit of "ten days ride" "we can make it to the castle in two days" stuff, because it really helps give a time frame reference and that's really nice.

--

Deeply underexplored issue here. Kent seems a little more uneasy about this than sain, though.

i do have to respect sain's stance--that if these people attacked with no hesitation whatsoever, it could mean they've joined lundgren. but the next chapter makes that stance a lot more shaky...and while kent say she hopes sain is right, he doesn't seem that convinced himself (he can tell something is wrong).

and wow this is kind of what is wrong, right? this says all it needs to. kent was right to worry about fighting soldiers from caelin. they believe kent and sain are the traitors, now. why would they hesitate?

also

i'm just saying

this is SO FUCKING FUNNY TO ME

but.

BUT

it'd be funny as shit if kent and sain were gaslighting the shit out of lyn only to discover along the way that she actually IS the heiress--oh wait that's anastasia lmfao bye

--

interesting is that laus, tuscana, kathelet, tania, and santaruz all remain completely neutral in the inheritance dispute in caelin. and technically pherae too, since eliwood will not participate. but what's weird about this is...how long must this have taken? eliwood would have had to send word to all these places. you're talking days to send word and days to hear back. like???? it's not like they had a choice but still. this journey is a lot longer than it seems at first glance lmao.

AHHH HE'S HERE HE'S EHRE

WALLACE!!! I MISSED YOU SO MUCH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

i looove how kent and sain get protective of lyn when wallace shows up.

wallace is an interesting and fun opposite to marquess araphen i think. like araphen also loved madelyn (and it's...? maybe implied that wallace did, too? or did i hallucinate that?) but while araphen instantly sees lyn and thinks she looks too much like her father, wallace immediately comments on her eyes. also, the way he immediately says his loyalty has been pledged to caelin and that he won't let a usurper on the throne... he knows she's telling the truth and i don't think it's her bright eyes that do that. he definitely recognizes some of her mom's features in herrr ahhhhhhh wallaceeeeee

i love this chapter too because it really digs into how nasty shit is in caelin right now, and how deeply corrupt the place is--not to mention how easy it is to take advantage of people when you're in a position of power.

i love the conversations between eagler and kent + eagler and sain. eagler calls sain a traitor right away, but he doesn't say that to kent. and kent pleads with him a little, too, right away: "We found Lady Lyndis on the orders of the marquess. We've worked so very hard to return her safely to Caelin." and eagler says they have no proof and kent's like "yes, but" and eagler tells him to draw his weapon.

which is like. i mean it's obvious very quickly that eagler is being held under someone else's thumb. it's not hard to see that this could happen to anyone; surely kent and sain also have families; if they had stayed in caelin instead, they might very well be on the wrong side in this dispute themselves--and if not ignorantly, then because they were being threatened.

anyway...we are almost done with the prologueeeee.

level ups!

not bad not bad

bro....chill.

AYYEE GURL

AYEE

basically out of image space so i won't include the others but hey!

[flokivilgerdarson]

Flóki, better known as Flóki the Boatbuilder, is Ragnar's loyal friend and helped him build the ships for the crossing with his craftsmanship talent, which brought Ragnar much fame and made him famous as a boatbuilder himself. Father of his Star of the eyes, Caya Freia. Grandfather of Illian, Marlena, Ellinor and Baldur. Great grandfather of Ragnar Ivain, Lidija Marlene and Ranva Aleen. He is a true Norseman and Viking through and through, who loves nothing more than to pay homage to the gods, even the darker ones that haunt him, and is a distant descendant of the god Loki. At the beginning, Flóki lives far away from the village of Kattegat, sweats figures there, builds things, explores the forest and is known for being crazy. The shipbuilder is absolutely loyal to Ragnar and supports him wherever he can and does everything for him. He also has a close relationship with all of Ragnar's sons, whom he loves just as much as he loved Ragnar, and looks after Ragnar's sons when he turns his back on Kattegat and his sons after his last defeat and looks after them. After the death of his beloved daughter Angrboða, he and Helga find a small, abandoned bundle and take care of the little girl, whom they christen Caya Freia and who becomes their daughter. Even though Flóki is against it at first, he feels a special bond with the little girl who becomes the apple of his eye. He also has a particularly close relationship with Ivar, as he not only taught him the deep, old customs but also has a deep bond with Ragnar's youngest son, whose upbringing he helped raise. Flóki hates the Christians and their false god, whose hatred draws him closer and goes so deep and drives him, which is why he often comes into conflict with Ragnar and stands against him. He detests the Christians and was always ready to fight against them in the bloodiest battles, for Ragnar and the gods. Flóki not only seems crazy, he is not always taken seriously and likes to play pranks, but the cunning man is not to be underestimated. Nor should his cunning and tricks. Flóki often seems unpredictable, sometimes heartless and always mysterious. Because of his love for the gods, whom he always defends and fights for and always acts according to their will, he has a particularly close bond with them that cannot be broken and is loyal to them and his people as well as Ragnar's family from the bottom of his heart. But the shipbuilder, whose moods change unpredictably, is not always easy to understand. As soon as something goes wrong, he looks for the blame in others, withdraws or hides or once again begins to sink into his strong self-doubts. However, when he is faced with winning, he stops at nothing. After taking revenge for Ragnar's death and the loss of Helga, he begins to sail away and surrender himself into the hands of the gods, dejected and empty, and turns his back on Kattegat, his daughter and Ragnar's sons. After discovering Iceland, he recruits others to help him build a settlement there where they can live in peace and harmony without blood and revenge, but fails and disappears without a trace. Later, Ubbe finds him in the golden land where the wild, crazy boatbuilder had settled and they both return to Kattegat. Back to his beloved daughter and to Ragnar's sons, for whom he is always there and takes care of the family. [ • VIKINGS ]

[johnnysuhbmarine]

My Favorite English Line for each NCT Member

Okay, this is something that has been on my mind for a while, but I think I've finally sorted things out enough to finish the complete list, so now I'm sharing it with the world (cause ya know, to the world, nct)

Before we get started: this is my opinion, and not what I'm claiming to be their most iconic or best line (because then we all know what Jaehyun's would be and it has to do with queso), but these are just my favorite lines to listen to because they make me transcend or something.

Also, I did not include solo stuff when compiling this because otherwise, some line from Horizon would beat out every other Jaehyun line and that's too much personal bias to feel like including - I just really love Horizon.

Now, it's time to share my most ambitious project yet:

Johnny: "ice on with no lights on, but you're still shining yeah" (faded in my last song)

you guys, you guys. the way he sings this is crazy. I love Johnny Suh

Taeyong: "multicolored diamonds like the rainbow yeah, yeah, yeah" (regular)

it's just so addicting I don't think you guys understand. especially with his little choreography, it's perfect

Yuta: "baby we go wild. 127 squad" (kick it)

nothing gets me pumped up like how this Yuta line gets me pumped up. it's so good. he's so good!!

Kun: "it was all out of my control but I really want you to know the truth" (on my youth english version)

the way this is sung, I could listen to it on repeat forever. fantastic job, Kun. wish I could give him a pat on the head for this.

Doyoung: "so stay" (promise you)

Doyoung biases don't come at me for my favorite line of his only being two words. Doyoung is my son, I love him with everything in me, and this is so soft and perfect of him that there's no way it couldn't be my favorite. he's the reason this song is so amazing.

Ten: "oh baby, give it to me" (baby don't stop)

yeah this absolutely raises me from the grave it's so aurally pleasing I can't even begin to describe it.

Jaehyun: "it's a cruel game, I cannot lose" (sit down!)

everyone go listen to this song right now I'm not even kidding. this Jaehyun line is so addicting and perfect and hot wow.

WinWin: "we should be together, you should know" (king of hearts)

I have ALWAYS loved this part, so finding my favorite english line for him was pretty easy because wow. what a pre-chorus this man gives us. thank you, WinWin.

Jungwoo: "hey, I see you" (ay-yo)

back to absolutely transcending this line is crazy. very good, Jungwoo. wow.

Mark: "skrrt pull up in the coupe beep beep. girl, I got your lovin' on repeat" (highway to heaven english version)

I actually cannot explain how much I love this line. my mom even listens to this song with me specifically because she also knows how FANTASTIC and addicting this part is.

Xiaojun: "can I be honest? I so hate to be controlled" (take off)

wow. everything about Xiaojun is just wow, including this line.

Hendery: "falling for a stranger, good gracious" (love talk english version)

you guys. you guys. it's the "good gracious." why is it so addicting and perfect? I love Hendery so much I cannot even begin to explain, but this line is surely one of the reasons why because wow. I am asexual, but when Hendery sings this...

Renjun: "I go round and around like a merry-go" (SOS)

again, if I was going for iconic, I would've put his bridge in ISTJ, but this line of his is so perfect and aurally pleasing that I physically couldn't not put it in this list. this one line is the reason I love SOS as much as I do.

Jeno: "you owe me sleep" (broken melodies)

CRIESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS. that is all I have to say about that.

Haechan: "you see my hope was all but gone" (superhuman)

okay this one is a very iconic line but can I be blamed for it also being on my favorites list? no. because this line is the definition of transcendental. everything about it, including Haechan, is perfect.

Jaemin: "shakin’ stirrin’ drinkin’ up" (smoothie)

this Jaemin line is crazy I really don't know what else to tell you. Actually affects every nerve in my body

YangYang: "she's a keeper, but I just can't keep her" (low low)

you guys. you know it's good when I pull out the "you guys" as my only coherent thought at first. YangYang eats here.

Chenle: "guess I finally get back to you" (broken melodies)

is my favorite line for my bias and bias wrecker in NCT Dream both from my favorite NCT Dream song? yes, but the fact that I am in love with how Chenle sings this line has nothing to do with the fact that it feeds into my delusions. I promise.

Jisung: "hate this distance cause I'm just left here singing" (broken melodies)

okay, Jisung isn't my bias nor bias wrecker but my favorite line of his still comes from Broken Melodies because NO ONE sings this part like he does and I have to make sure you all are aware of that. this line was made for Jisung.

Okay that- that's all. I have no clue what to do with myself now.

[klarolinexluv]

Chapter 10 of Don't Blame Me (Love Made Me Crazy) is out now!

Snippet:

Regulus tries to ignore it. Tries to ignore the fact that something is wrong, that something is going to happen and Regulus isn’t sure what to do, how to handle it. So he doesn’t. He can feel himself slip away, slowly falling into the recesses of his own mind. He isn't calm. His thoughts still run wild. James’ words sound distant, his fingers feel cold. Under him, James is rigid and stiff. He doesn’t understand. 

“I can’t stay,” James says after a long time, his voice still sounds wrong, distant, weird, odd. He doesn’t sound like James at all. Regulus sits up slowly, frowning at him. He can’t really concentrate, can’t pinpoint why this isn’t right. Something is happening and Regulus doesn’t know what.

“What?” Regulus whispers quietly, his own voice sounds vacant to his own ears. 

James places a soft kiss to Regulus head before sitting up himself, pulling away and out of Regulus reach. He sits on the couch frozen, his mind whirling and not entirely processing, “I’m Regs, I need to go.” James gets up and begins to walk away. 

Regulus stares unseeingly into the fire for a beat or two before shooting to his feet. “What the fuck James?! What could possibly be more important right now? I fucking need you and you what… you don’t care?” He thinks he shouted but he cannot be sure, he isn't sure what his face is doing either. 

James turns to face him, an expression riddled with guilt and pain that Regulus doesn’t understand. He visibly hesitates, stalling his answer before simply blurting, “I think we should break up…”

Regulus’ world promptly shatters. His heart blistering and breaking into pieces, “what?” he says quietly, his voice thick with tension. 

“I said…” James begins, hesitating, swallowing visibly. Regulus stares at him, eyes wide, shook and hurt written all over his face, of which he is certain. James’ eyes swirl with emotions that Regulus cannot even begin to comprehend. “I said, I think we should-” 

“No, I know what you said…” Regulus stares across the room at James, the small distance seeming like a great big void between them. James hands fidget with themselves before he tucks them into his trouser pockets.  “Why?” his voice cracks, “Did I do something?” 

He shakes his head, bringing a hand to his hair and pushing a rough hand through his unruly locks, “Of course not, Regs. No you did absolutely nothing, I just…” he trails off, grimacing to himself before looking over at Regulus with the most pitifully guilty expression he has ever seen, “I love you, Regulus but… but I’m in love with Lily.”

And that just… what the fuck. 

Regulus has nothing to say to that. He knew this would happen. He forgot about it for a while, genuinely hoping that this was forever, that all their promises would remain intact. Of course he was wrong. When has the universe ever given Regulus what he wants? 

Silence stretches as he stares blankly, the words bouncing around his skull like a muggle wrecking ball, destroying everything he thought he knew on sight. It takes a moment for everything to settle back into place but then he simply nods once, “okay…”

“Reggie I-”

“You said you had to go.” Regulus turns his back to him, his mind numb as he stares into the fire, fingers tugging gently at the gryffindor jumper he so eagerly threw on earlier. 

“...Yeah… Okay…” and he does. He goes. 

[meta-squash]

do you have many thoughts on the jack owen relationship? I always thought that one was so interesting

Yes I do! I love their relationship, I think it's soooo interesting.

From Jack's angle, I think the whole thing is pretty straightforward. He really cares for Owen, in a sort of fatherly way. It's clear he feels responsible for Owen and at times a little helpless in the face of Owen's emotional sensitivity and ensuing bastardry. I think he's intensely aware of Owen's talent and his potential and also so very aware of just how much Owen cares under that shield of sarcasm and assholery.

Owen's angle is a little more complicated. He's constantly trapped between hating being told what to do and needing direction, trapped between wanting support and pushing it away. He's in general an emotional minefield, so sensitive and so ready to snap at the world and bite anyone's head off. But I think he's conflicted regarding Jack too, because on one level he blames Jack for Katie's death and for his general misery, but on the other hand Jack gave him a chance to start a new life, and I think he really really really wants Jack's approval and acceptance. He's so raw all of the time and his reaction when he's upset is just to freak out and destroy, and I think sometimes Jack's stable presence is good for him.

And thank you for this ask because thinking about my answer made me figure something out. Another thing is the way in which, in terms with the relationship with Jack, Owen sits right in between Gwen and Ianto, and Toshiko. Jack gives Tosh support when she needs it, but I think she is pretty good at being alone (in the introvert way; she's definitely still lonely, they all are). Gwen and Ianto both get plenty of interaction and connection from Jack, and they seek it out. Owen is terrible at being alone, but he is, and Jack sometimes relieves that but not as often as he probably should. Not because he doesn't want to, but because Owen is terrible at being alone and yet constantly forces himself to be alone.

I also think Jack really struggles with figuring out how to help Owen when he's truly upset. The problem with Owen is that he wants to be supported but he wants to feel in control and he really, really doesn't want to feel pitied. So attempt at support will get a pushback, but just kind of being sharp about it will send him into a different kind of tailspin.

The three ways we see Jack deal with Owen's upset are so fascinating to me. First, in Combat, Jack essentially ignores Owen's misery. It's fairly obvious that Owen is Wallowing and that he's genuinely heartbroken. Jack barely acknowledges it, sends him on an assignment, and the consequences are a genuinely very suicidal Owen only surviving suicide by Weevil by accident of location and timing (since Owen doesn't have comms/phone/tracker on him when he's in the warehouse). Jack's reaction to Owen's "I didn't want saving" in the hospital is to refuse to acknowledge it. I think it's really really really hard for Jack to admit to himself that there are things his team does and feels that a) are out of his control and b) he cannot just fix.

Then there's the exact opposite: Jack's support of Owen in Dead Man Walking. I mean first of all, he loved Owen enough to bring him back. That's crazy. He knows, from Suzie, that bringing someone back to life is not a trivial thing. There are consequences. Not to mention at this point Jack has lost so many friends and colleagues and lovers. And yet Owen is the one he decides to bring back. (I've always thought that he used the Glove instead of Gwen because he was hoping it would bring Owen back like Suzie, and he has infinite life force to feed off of.) (Also, it's wild that Owen is the most actively suicidal team member and yet he's the one who dies and gets brought back.) And then, when Owen is freaking out, Jack is there for him. Jack seeks him out, he comforts him, talks to him. He touches Owen, and Owen is a tactile person. Despite the circumstances, it's such a good moment, because I think it's the kind of thing Owen needs. Physical contact but also very honest and straightforward conversation and verbal support, without any platitudes or patronizing.

Finally you have A Day In The Death, which is a very similar situation to Combat. Owen is (understandably) freaking out about his undead existence. And I think again Jack has no idea what to do about it. He feels guilty (for bringing Owen back "wrong") but also self-righteous (for giving Owen a second chance etc), and it shows. He really, really doesn't know what to do with Owen. Treating him like normal isn't really possible until they figure out how his undead-ness affects everything, but treating him the way he does (making him take Ianto's job) is essentially a punishment for Jack's own actions. Owen's already having this crisis about no longer having sensation, no longer being able to eat or drink or fuck or sleep, and Martha is doing his job for him, and he's forced to do Ianto's job (which everyone including Owen knows he's not very good at), and it's so much the opposite of any sort of support. I can't remember which fic it is right now (probably something by paperclipbitch on LJ, she's queen of excellent Owen content) where Owen comments about how there's protocol and guidelines for how team members should deal with the death of a coworker, but nothing on how a coworker should deal with their own (un)death. I think this is what a lot of A Day In The Death is about. It's everyone else trying to deal with the weirdness of Owen's death, while Owen is alone by himself trying desperately to deal with his (un)death without anyone actually sitting him down and asking him how he's coping and what he needs, etc. He comes close with that conversation with Martha, but doesn't quite get there. It's the conversation with Henry (who doesn't know he's dead) that gets him to some place of peace.

(Side note: it's really fascinating how the sort of "moral" of both Glove episodes - TKKS and ADITD - is something along the lines of "life is all" like Suzie says, except that Suzie's reaction is to desperately kill and Owen's reaction is desperation to save a dying man even when it's impossible, and then to actually save a suicidal woman.)

But I also love the way that Jack and Owen do actual work together. Owen, when he's not being a shithead or falling apart, is extremely competent and responsible at his job. And I think both Owen and Jack respect each other in that sense. It drives me a little bit nuts that Gwen becomes second in command when it really should be Owen (my little headcanon is that when Jack left Owen became leader and then hated it and found it too stressful and let Gwen take over instead). Anyway. I love those moments when they have matter of fact, respectful, "work" conversations, where they obviously value each other's thoughts and opinions. It means that when Owen pushes back, he's not just being contrarian. He does value Jack's opinions, so when he talks back it's because he genuinely takes issue with something.

Which circles back around to the whole "wanting support but also pushing back against authority" thing because the entire conflict in End Of Days is brought about at least in part by Jack refusing to extend that respect. Owen loved Jack and wanted him back so much that he opened the Rift (I have a whole other thought about Jack's dumbassery regarding the whole blame for opening the Rift thing...I can talk about that in another post too) but Jack can't be grateful for coming back and can't extend that respect by admitting that he's clueless about how to stop time from splintering. I think the confrontation between Jack and Owen when Owen gets fired is entirely predicated on this. Owen did this thing to bring Jack and Tosh back, he feels both righteous (for getting them back) and guilty (for causing the split), and he wants Jack to acknowledge that he was right to bring them back. Instead, Jack blames him for the splintering, and gives no advice on fixing it, and when Owen finally explodes and brings up all the uncertainty and unknowns and things, he gets fired. Rejected by the one person he really wants acceptance and support from.

I can never decide if I see Jack and Owen as a sort of father/son relationship, or if I see it more as like the older brother 10+ years Owen's senior who took care of and partially raised him but is almost like a friend with authority rather than a parent. In any case, I think there's a lot of push and pull there, in Owen wanting support but hating authority, and also a lot of mutual respect there.

[stepfordgoth]

Ok I need to come clean about something. This is going to sound sooo...... idk, narcissistic? Self absorbed? Idk. But in the past few weeks I've gotten a bit hooked on reddit, which is something I never thought I would say. And it is specifically because of how much it strokes my ego to see the stupidity in full, glorified, unironic display there. I know I made a post a few weeks ago about how crazy it is that reddit has somehow recently made tumblr feel like an honest, unbiased, intelligent, good faith website to express ideas and opinions on, but holy shit. They are brainwashed over there. It's wild to see, kind of addictive to watch for some reason.

I'm gonna give a specific example but I'm gonna first reiterate that I've never been a trump fan. I've never voted for him in anything, I've never argued in his favor, I've never even been the person to say things like "well I don't like him but he makes some interesting points" or "he's just saying what everyone else is thinking" or anything like that, and I highly doubt I will be ever be. Just wanna get that out there.

Anyway, yesterday I saw a thread on Reddit where was someone lamenting that they're no longer going to be watching comedy news shows (John Oliver, John Stewart, etc) because they're at their wits end about the election results in general and cannot mentally handle the constant talk about trump on those shows anymore, and they're sick of the formula of all of the "jokes" being like: hey folks, orange man bad right?; well here's something even crazier he did today; isn't he just awful?; we sure are in it now folks!; aren't his supporters just the dumbest poor people?, etc.

And oh my god honestly..... I had kind of forgotten that those shows existed. I certainly didn't realize anyone is still watching that stuff. How the FUCK are these people just now getting sick of every punchline being about orange man bad? It's been going on for almost a decade now. Have those people seriously been enjoying that stuff and finding entertainment value within it, right up until election day 2024? That's bonkers to me. In my opinion the constant orange man bad punchline has been consistently overdone since about 2017. It is the absolute lowest hanging fruit of our time. And the idea that those comedy news shows (that if I'm honest, I never watched anyway but I've seen enough clips and such to have a good idea of what they're all about) have pretty much just been rich people talking down to the viewer through the screen about stupid poor people being to blame for the orange menace™ for almost a decade now is actually pretty fucked up when you think about it. How does the average American, who is probably poor and stupid themselves (globally speaking), watch that shit habitually for years and not have an issue with it until the depression of the reality of the orange man winning the election sets in for them?

So yeah I don't want to say I have a bit of a superiority complex but I do feel smarter and better than those people lol. Reddit is nice for that :)

[nyxshadowhawk]

The Red Book, Liber Primus: Part Two

I'm picking up right where I left off, so please go read Part One: https://nyxshadowhawk.tumblr.com/post/728084509673799680/the-red-book-liber-primus-part-one#notes

Soul and God

Jung says to his soul:

Who are you, child? My dreams have represented you as a child and as a maiden. I am ignorant of your mystery. Forgive me if I speak as in a dream, like a drunkard — are you God? Is God a child, a maiden?

Throughout this chapter, Jung has to grapple with unorthodox ideas of what God looks like. God as a child, let alone a maiden, is so dissonant with typical ideas of divinity in Christianity that I can’t really blame him for reeling over it. I see this as validation that God is inherently polymorphic, and can appear to different people in different ways depending on what they need to see. Jung sees God as a child or a maiden, and I see God as… well… a femboy.

Scholarliness belongs to the spirit of the time [i.e. the conscious mind], but this spirit in no way grasps the dream, since the soul is everywhere that scholarly knowledge is not.

“The soul is everywhere that scholarly knowledge is not” is a great way of putting it. I’ve had to constantly grapple with the balance between my analytical mind and my mystical mind, and since Jung was both a scientist and a mystic, I imagine he needed to do the same. The analytic mind needs everything to be backed up with primary sources and/or proven with empirical evidence, and it needs all of its arguments to be airtight. The mystical mind needs to make wild connections between unrelated things and to take symbols at face value, going more than a bit crazy in the process. The mystical and analytical parts of the mind can work in tandem, but they shouldn’t be confused with each other. If you let the mystical mind handle the analytic stuff, that’s how you get conspiracy theories. If you let the analytic mind handle the mystical stuff, it will shut them down and try to force them into a framework. Scholarship can’t reach everywhere, because some things just don’t make sense, and scholarship is also limited by the zeitgeist (i.e. what we know and how we know it, who’s in power and what their narrative is, needing things to make sense through the cultural lens).

But how can I attain the knowledge of the heart? You can attain this knowledge only by living your life to the full. You live your life fully if you also live what you have never yet lived, but have left for others to live and to think. But you should say, “The life that I could still live, I should live, and the thoughts that I could still think, I should think.” It appears as though you want to flee from yourself so as not to have to live what remains unlived until now. But you cannot flee from yourself. It is with you all the time and demands fulfillment. If you pretend to be blind and dumb to this demand, you feign being blind and deaf to yourself.

This reminds me a lot of the line spoken by Lord Henry in The Picture of Dorian Gray, “To realize one’s nature fully — that is what each of us is here for.” I’d say that this was a Jungian reference, except that Oscar Wilde was writing before Jung wrote any of this. I completely agree that before you attain any real spiritual knowledge, you must have as complete an understanding of yourself as possible. If you avoid developing this understanding of your internal world, then you won’t be really living, and you’ll feel that emptiness and lack of fulfillment that characterizes midlife crisis. And you won’t learn anything.

I had to recognize that I am only the expression and symbol of the soul. In the sense of the spirit of the depths, I am as I am in the visible world a symbol of my soul…

Again, really interesting concept — existing as a symbol of one’s soul, you existing through it instead of it through you. It’s the real thing, you’re the impression it leaves on the material world.

The spirit of the depths taught me to say, “I am the servant of a child.” Through this dictum I learn above all the most extreme humility, as what I most need.

The spirit of this time of course allowed me to believe in my reason. He let me see myself in the image of a leader with ripe thoughts. But the spirit of the depths teaches me that I am a servant, in fact the servant of a child. This dictum was repugnant to me and I hated it. But I had to recognize and accept that my soul is a child and that my God in my soul is a child.

Once again, Jung has a hard time seeing the divine in things that are small, trivial, or mundane. It’s so ridiculous to him that God should appear like a little kid, and that he should be in service to this little kid, that to admit this requires “extreme humility.”

If you are boys, your God is a woman. If you are women, your God is a boy. If you are men, your God is a maiden. The God is where you are not.

“The God is where you are not.” I love this. This suggests that there is something inherently divine about the Shadow, the inverse of whatever your conscious mind considers itself to be. Wherever you don’t build your conscious mind, God fills the empty space. It’s pretty natural for us humans to project ourselves onto God and interpret God as looking like us, hence why God is assumed to be a powerful old man in this patriarchal society. It’s quite another thing to be able to see God in something that isn’t like us, that doesn’t reflect the ideal. That’s another recurring theme.

I don’t know whether it’s always true that a man’s god is a maiden and a woman’s god is a boy, but I know that my god appears as a femboy.

The same inversion occurs with age. If you’re an old person, you have a young god, and vice-versa.

What is better, that man has life ahead of him, or that God does? I know no answer. Life; the unavoidable decides.

This is one of those utterly weird, out-of-the-box mystical ideas that are just so much fun to wonder about. The idea that god ages, that a young god belong to an old person may have more life ahead of it than the living human does, and the question of whether it is better for you to have more life or for your God to have more life. I don’t have an answer to that, either.

My God is a child, so wonder not that the spirit of this time in me is incensed to mockery and scorn. There will be no one who will laugh at me as I have laughed at myself.

Your God should not be a man of mockery, rather you yourself will be the man of mockery. You should mock yourself fand rise above this. If you have still not learned this from the old holy books, then go there, drink the blood and eat the flesh of him who was mocked and tormented for the sake of our sins, so that you totally become his nature, deny his being-apart-from-you; you should be he himself, not Christians but Christ, otherwise you will be of no use to the coming God.

You do not overcome the old teachings through doing less, but through doing more. Every step closer to my soul excites the scornful laughter of my devils, those cowardly ear-whisperers and poison-mixers. It was easy for them to laugh, since I had to do strange things.

The inner Zeitgeist, the voice of the society that Jung lives in, mocks him for his submission to a little kid. Jung feels like he is kind of immune to mockery at this point because no one can possibly mock him for this more than he mocks himself. He throws that mystical mockery into focus with this irreverent but also completely true characterization of Christianity. See, Jung gets it. He realizes that the Eucharist is, in fact, exactly what it looks like. You take God into you. You consume it. You become God. That’s the most mystical thing I’ve heard of this side of Orphism. You’re not a Christian, you are Christ himself, because you’ve partaken in Christ. Get with the program.

I don’t really blame Jung for distancing himself from mysticism throughout his career, because of the threat of mockery. Mysticism still has a stigma attached to it. Scientists don’t like it because it’s pure unadulterated crazy, and Christianity has a very weird relationship to it despite it arguably being the basis of the entire faith (see above). To be a mystic is to be isolated from and mocked by both camps. It’s easy to laugh at because, well, it’s very weird.

On the Service of the Soul

If you take a step towards your soul, you will think that you will at first miss the meaning. You will believe that you have sunk into meaninglessness, into eternal disorder. You will be right! Nothing will deliver you from disorder and meaninglessness, since this is the other half of the world.

Someone please tell Jordan Peterson that Jung says he needs to come to grips with chaos. Chaos matters because it’s half the world, so there is no “antidote” to it, no overcoming it. All you can really do is work with it.

If you marry the ordered to the chaos you produce the divine child, the supreme meaning beyond meaning and meaninglessness.

This is the Chemical Wedding, the orderly (fixed) sulfur and the chaotic (volatile) mercury producing the Philosopher’s Stone, which is an even mix of both. That volatile “dark flood of chaos” transmutes into fixed matter if you just sit with it and let it sort itself out.

I too was afraid, since we had forgotten that God is terrible. Christ taught: God is love. But you should know that love is also terrible.

Everyone has forgotten that God is terrible, and I think that’s a problem. Every time the atheists point out how evil and mean God is in the Old Testament, and how starkly this clashes with the all-loving God that Christians profess they worship, they treat it like it’s an invalidation of the entirety of Christianity. And it is, only because Christians expect everything to be internally consistent. God is, in fact, both, and that is The Point™. There’s also the fact that mystical experiences can be utterly terrifying, awesome and awful and sublime. God is scary as hell, people!

You dread the depths. It should horrify you, since the way of what is to come leads through it. You must endure the temptation of fear and doubt, and at the same time acknowledge to the bone that your fear is justified and your doubt is reasonable.

The first step of spiritual advancement is through the darkness, the chaos, the Underworld. You have to do your Shadow work first. It’s completely reasonable to be afraid of that, because it’s scary by nature, but you’ve still got to do it.

You still have to learn this, to succumb to no temptation, but to do everything of your own will, then you will be be free and beyond Christianity.

So interesting that this book contains what is essentially a road map to transcending Christianity! That’s because “the way of what is to come” involves the dark as well as the light, down as well as up, both halves of the whole. Seeing everything as good and light and “holy” all the time is just as much a temptation as the Devil in the desert. Man that’s ahead of its time!

I have had to recognize that I must submit to what I fear; yes, even more, that I must love what horrifies me.

Shadow work in a nutshell!

The slave to virtue finds the way as little as the slave to vices.

A repetition of what I said above, that divinity doesn’t mean all-goodness-all-the-time. Focusing only on the good and bright and celestial things is only half the equation and is still shooting yourself in the foot.

If you thought you were the master of your soul, become her servant. If you were her servant, become her master.

Inversion again. Whatever you think your relationship to your soul is, flip it and see what happens.

The Desert

(I’ll give you a moment to go and play the Journey soundtrack while you read this. *Opens Spotify*)

Jung’s self appears as a barren desert, because he has neglected it. This is the first time he’s ever really paid attention to his internal world. The “creative power of desire” is absent from Jung’s desert. If you’re able to focus on your internal world, and not just on “things, men, and thoughts,” you can cultivate it into a garden. (My own mindscape is a Skyrim-esque landscape that looks like green hills and pine forests surrounded by high, craggy silver mountains. It’s slowly developed into Umbragard.) Even if your mindscape is a garden, you still need things, men, and thoughts, but at least you will be their friend instead of their slave.

I turned myself away from things and men, but that is precisely how I became the secure prey of my thoughts, yes, I wholly became my thoughts.

If this is the first time you’ve ever focused on the internal world, then your thoughts will overwhelm you pretty quickly. I’ve spent a lot of time in my internal world, and I still get easily overwhelmed.

When you say that the place of the soul is not, then it is not. When you say that it is, then it is. Notice what the ancients said in images: the word is a creative act. The ancients said: in the beginning was the Word. Consider this and think upon it.

Oh boy, how do I sum this up quickly? I already had notes about this concept from another part of my Book of Shadows that I wrote long before reading this, so I’ll just post that here:

Eliphas Levi writes in Doctrine and Ritual, “To speak is to create.” To think is to exist (“I think therefore I am”), so to speak is more powerful than thought, and writing more powerful than that. This is why many gods of magic are also associated with words, both spoken and written. Hermes is the god of magic, and also of speech and of writing, which are forms of discourse — they’re an exchange of ideas, the same way goods and services are exchanged, and the same way people physically move from place to place when they travel. Hermes’ base characterization as messenger god is based around this same concept, the exchange of information between people. Thoth is self-begotten — he literally willed himself into existence. He decided that he existed, and so he did. In addition to magic, he is also the god of writing, books, record-keeping, and wisdom. Odin discovered the Norse writing system by hanging himself on the World Tree, Yggdrasil, and observing the patterns of its fallen branches. Through this act of self-sacrifice, he received the knowledge of runes. The line between speech/writing and magic is slim. This is why God created the world through “the Word,” and why many occultists believe that if you can pronounce God’s unspeakable name correctly, you can command the entire universe.

So, magic is as simple as it is difficult — you just have to state that something is so, and then accept that it is. It’s really hard to convince your mind that it’s actually possible to do that, and not a form of self-delusion that you’ll be mocked for. My gods have advised me that the easiest spell I can do to end my anxiety is “If I say everything is okay, then it is.” Not easy to convince myself of that while I’m anxious. But it really is that simple. To state that something is so is to bring it into being.

The words that oscillate between nonsense and supreme meaning are the oldest and truest.

Ain’t that the truth. Mystical experiences are somehow both complete insanity and the most profound truth there is, at the same time. That’s how you know that their messages and symbols are older than dirt.

Experiences in the Desert

Jung confronts his soul in the desert. The soul says to Jung, “Don’t you know that the way to truth stands open only to those without intentions?” This rings true for me. If you intend to get something out of a particular experience, then you’ll ignore everything that doesn’t align with the intention. What you want to learn and what you try to do is going to interfere with what you’re actually being taught or given. Intention is for magic; mysticism really requires a state of passive reception, so that you don’t overanalyze things. I have a tendency to shut down meditative visions because I’ll try to plan them out or somehow control them, and that makes them fizzle. My gods recommend that I stop trying to accomplish something specific, and ask more questions.

We tie ourselves up with intentions.

Take it from me: If you try to accomplish something, you will end up getting stuck.

The soul says to Jung, “Do you know who I am? Have you grasped me, defined me, and made me into a dead formula? Have you measured the depths of my chasms, and explored all the ways down which I am yet going to lead you?”

I love this. It implies that the soul is something inherently immeasurable, incomprehensible, and utterly unscientific. You cannot define the soul. That’s the conscious mind attempting to impose a framework onto something that’s too amorphous to really fit into one. Of course, Jung will attempt to create this framework anyway, but that doesn’t change the fact that the best way to understand the soul is to not try to understand it.

The spirit of this time considers itself extremely clever, like every such spirit of the time. But wisdom is simpleminded, not just simple. […] Only in the desert do we become aware of our terrible simplemindedness, but we are afraid of admitting it. […] We cannot save ourselves through increasing our cleverness, but through accepting what our cleverness hates most, namely simplemindedness. Yet we also do not want to be artificial fools because we have fallen into simplemindedness, rather we will be clever fools. That leads to supreme meaning. Cleverness couples itself with intention. Simplemindedness knows no intention. Cleverness conquers the world, but simplemindedness the soul.

I’m betting that this is why the protagonist of so many fairy tales is a “simpleton.” They’re a person who doesn’t overthink things, doesn’t have an agenda, doesn’t operate from a place of self-interest or distrust. Their utter lack of cynicism is what allows them to accept help from ignoble-looking supernatural beings and friendly animals. They recieve all experiences with childlike wonder. They choose the plain-looking object instead of the shiny gold one, because they don’t feel the need to impress anybody. They aren’t stupid, per se — they’re more like 0 The Fool in a tarot deck, in that their naivete prevents them from being clever, and that works out well for them.

Jung’s conscious mind keeps saying “this is stupid!” but he has to stick with it. Overcoming his scorn at himself brings him nearer to his soul, and his desert starts to become green. “Many will laugh at my foolishness. But no one will laugh more than I laughed at myself.”

Descent into Hell in the Future

Time for katabasis! You knew it was coming. No Hero’s Journey is complete without a full-on descent into the Underworld.

Do you want me to leave myself to chance, to the madness of my own darkness? Wither? Wither? You fall, and I want to fall with you, whoever you are.

The spirit of the depths opened my eyes and I caught a glimpse of the inner things, the world of my soul, the many-formed and changing.

Most of the illustrations are big, beautiful paintings in in Liber Secundus, but there’s a few small ones nestled in Liber Primus. The first one is this one of a man in white walking in the Underworld, surrounded by shadowy monsters. The man in the image is too dark-skinned to be Jung, and he has shoulder-length black hair, but is clearly meant to represent Jung. I’m not sure why Jung decided to represent himself this way. But then again, the form that I take during my active imagination also looks nothing like me, so I get it.

Jung describes a cave of black water, across which is a “luminous red stone.” I immediately thought of the lake in the cave in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and the red stone is obviously a familiar image as well. Jung sees a severed head floating in the stream, a large black scarab, a red sun surrounded by snakes, represented in the next image:

There’s some interpretation of these images, but before we get there, Jung writes at length about one of my favorite subjects — divine madness!

These lines really struck me:

When can I order my thinking to be quiet, so that my thoughts, those unruly hounds, will crawl to my feet? How can I ever hope to hear your voice louder, to see you clearer, when all my thoughts howl? […] The fullness of my knowledge threatens to fall in on me. My knowledge was a thousand voices, an army roaring like lions; the air trembles when they speak, and I am their defenseless sacrifice. […] Let me persist in divine astonishment, so that I am ready to behold your wonders.

As a person who deals with anxiety and shame on a regular basis, I can say from experience that the voices of one’s thoughts can be overwhelming to the point of being intolerable. I’ve had fight-or-flight triggered by my thoughts alone, even when nothing bad is going on in real life (e.g. over something as non-threatening as sending emails). Likening those thoughts to an army of dangerous animals is a great metaphor. It’s also “knowledge” that Jung feels threatened by in this scene — knowledge can be helpful or powerful, but it also interferes with the ability to interpret dream-images at face value. Later in this paragraph, Jung cries for mercy from “science that clever knower” and the “serpent of judgement.” This goes back to what I was saying before about the balance between the analytic and the mystical mind. This is one context in which empirical thinking and analysis need not apply. Jung’s instincts to explain and categorize everything, to force them to make sense, and to pass judgement make the experience of katabasis even harder than it already is.

That’s where madness comes in. Madness suspends logic, judgement, and categorization. Madness forces you to allow things to not make sense. It is the state of being submerged in raw, unfiltered unconscious. Here’s what Jung has to say about it:

This is how I overcame madness. If you do not know what divine madness is, suspend judgement and wait for the fruits. But know that there is a divine madness which is nothing other than the overpowering of the spirit of this time through the spirit of the depths. Speak then of sick delusion when the spirit of the depths can no longer stay down and forces a man to speak in tongues instead of in human speech, and makes him believe that he himself is the spirit of the depths. But also speak of sick delusion when the spirit of this time does not leave a man and forces him to see only the surface, to deny the spirit of the depths and to take himself for the spirit of the times. The spirit of this time is ungodly, the spirit of the depths is ungodly, balance is godly.

[…]

Thus can you differentiate sick and divine delusion. Whoever does the one and does without the other you may call sick since he is out of balance.

That phrase “suspend judgement and wait for the fruits” means almost exactly the same thing as something Dionysus told me: “Take your sanity off like a mask, and take everything at face value as you would in a dream.” When you’re traversing the Otherworld, the way to maintain your sanity is to deliberately suspend your sanity. Attempting to overanalyze everything will drive you crazy, literally, because the Otherworld doesn’t conform to any kind of human logic. So, just accept it. If you remove your sanity, then it’ll still be there for you when you come back, instead of it getting damaged by all the nonsense that bombards you.

Jung defines madness as the Spirit of the Depths overtaking the Zeitgeist, i.e. the unconscious mind subsuming the conscious mind. He also distinguishes deliberate, mystical madness from psychiatric disorders — in the former case, one allows the Spirit of the Depths to take over, while in the latter case, the Spirit of the Depths forces itself on the person. I’ve made similar distinctions in some of my answers, like this one. Psychiatric disorders are debilitating, and prevent a person from living a normal life, while my mystical madness doesn’t last beyond my deliberate engagement with it and doesn’t interfere with my normal life. I think it’s interesting that Jung says that when a person is forcibly overtaken by the Spirit of the Depths, they think they are the Spirit of the Depths. That seems to describe all the people I’ve encountered on the internet who claim to be gods, unable to distinguish between their own fixed identities and the massive, inconsistent identities of the spirits. Sometimes it’s good to experience that (“ego death”), but you have to come back down again.

I also think it’s interesting that Jung defines possession by the Zeitgeist, denial of the unconscious mind and its contents, as a sort of mental illness. Such a person is probably the sort who allows atheism or reliance on scientific objectivity to essentially replace religion, blocking out any engagement with the irrational aspects of existence and denying that there is any healthy or productive way to engage with them. (One of the things I think Jung got right is that irrational, mystical, and weird things are an inherent and manifest part of life, and that science needs to find some way of addressing them.) The healthiest mental state is some balance between the two. There’s our running theme of reconciliation of duality.

Jung continues:

But who can withstand fear when the divine intoxication and madness comes to him? Love, soul, and God are beautiful and terrible. The ancients brought over some of the beauty of God into this world, and this world became so beautiful that it appeared to the spirit of the time to be fulfillment, and better than the bosom of the Godhead. The frightfulness and cruelty of the world lay under wraps and in the depths of our hearts. If the spirit of the depths seizes you, you will feel the cruelty and cry out in torment. The spirit of the depths is pregnant with iron, fire, and death. You are right to fear the spirit of the depths, as he is full of horror.

Divine madness is useful and productive, but it’s still madness, and therefore scary as all hell. Looking God full in the face is going to cause insanity, the question is whether it’s the permanent kind or not. God is full of beauty and wonder, but don’t assume (as the Zeitgeist does) that its unfathomable beauty is fulfillment in and of itself, because you still have to confront the abject horror of it to get the full picture. If you don’t, the Spirit of the Depths will make sure you do on its terms instead of yours, and it won’t be pretty.

Jung also says this a couple of paragraphs earlier:

To the extent that the Christianity of this time lacks madness, it lacks divine life. Take note of what the ancients taught us in images: madness is divine.

I’m definitely going to be quoting this line in future posts, because this right here is one of the big reasons I prefer Dionysus to Christ. Madness is divine, but Christianity doesn’t often leave a lot of room for madness, or magic. It categorizes everything into very rigid theology and word-for-word interpretations of the Bible, despite mysticism being at its core and a constant lurking presence throughout its history. (Someday, I promise I will write a long answer on that.) It (sometimes violently) rejects everything that doesn’t conform to its framework as heresy. If Christianity lacks its madness and mysticism, and becomes more about the frameworks of orthodoxy and politics, its spiritual core is gone. One of the running themes throughout Jung’s mystical experiences, going all the way back to his childhood, is that he has to grapple with the fact that Christianity doesn’t serve his spiritual needs. He recognizes that it is incomplete, and that it focuses on only one-half of the equation, but because of the time and place he lives in, he can’t just hop on over to Dionysus like I could. We’ll get back to this, too.

Moving on. Jung provides some interpretation of the three images he saw in the Underworld: the severed head floating in the river, the black scarab, and the red sun:

Blood shone at me from the red light of the crystal, and when I picked it up to discover its mystery, there lay the horror uncovered before me: in the depths of what is to come lay murder. The blond hero lay slain. The black beetle is the death that is necessary for renewal; and so, thereafter, a new sun glowed, the sun of the depths, full of riddles, a sun of the night. And as the rising sun of spring quickens the dead earth, so the sun of the depths quickened the dead, and thus began the terrible struggle between light and darkness. Out of that burst the powerful and ever unvanquished source of blood.

We’ll get back to the dead hero, because that gets its own chapter. The black scarab I immediately associated with the Egyptian god Khepri, who pushes the sun. Another connection I made that I’m surprised Jung didn’t explicitly spell out has to do with his drawing of the red sun — it looks exactly like an egg cell, and it’s surrounded by snakes that look like sperm, one of which is touching it. Jung interprets the snakes as the reanimated dead matter that blots out the sun, but the drawing looks like a moment of conception. A significant portion of Liber Primus focuses on the conception of the god of the new age, which is explicitly a god that reconciles dualities. Here is the conception of the God, inside the womb of the Earth. And, I’m realizing right now as I write this… Zeus conceived Zagreus with Persephone, the lady of the Underworld, in the form of a serpent… Adding on to that, Macrobius identifies Dionysus with the chthonic or dark aspect of the sun: “They observe the holy mystery in the rites by calling the sun Apollo when it is in the upper (that is, daytime) hemisphere; when it is in the lower (that is, night-time) hemisphere, it is considered Dionysus, who is Liber.” Gee, I wonder who the god of the new age is! (Obviously, I’m biased, so take what you will from this.)

It struck me that Jung’s description of the Underworld is very pagan. It doesn’t sound like a Christian depiction of Hell at all. There’s no fire, no demons, no sinners being tortured, none of Dante’s creative punishments or Lucifer and his angels plotting revenge. Instead we get rivers, the sun, a scarab beetle, and loads and loads of snakes. Jung seems to agree, because in a 1925 lecture (cited in the footnotes) he says:

The light in the cave from the crystal was, I thought, like the stone of wisdom [the philosopher’s stone]. The secret murder of the hero I could not understand at all. The beetle of course I knew to be an ancient sun symbol, and the setting sun, the luminous red disk, was archetypal. The serpents I thought might have been connected with Egyptian material. I could not then realize that it was all so archetypal.

I don’t know the details of all Jung’s theories on why he saw these specific images, but here’s my theory: The “pagan-ness” of this Underworld is a sign that it can be escaped. Hell is a place of punishment, of permanent separation from God if not literal torture. The pagan Underworld is a place of death, but death is part of a cycle, and a lot of hero stories involve some sort of katabasis or symbolic death and rebirth. This is the nigredo stage of alchemy, a critical first step of the initiation process. The Christian concept of Hell does not represent that very well. That’s just my opinion.

The next section is a commentary on how events have no inherent meaning, but that humans assign meaning to events:

The events that happen are always the same. But the creative depths of man are not always the same. Events signify nothing, they signify only in us. We create the meaning of events. The meaning is and always was artificial. We make it.

Because of this we seek in ourselves the meaning of events, so that the way of what is to come becomes apparent and our life can flow again.

That which you need comes from yourself, namely the meaning of the event. The meaning of events is not their particular meaning. This meaning exists in learned books. Events have no meaning.

The meaning of events comes from the possibility of life in this world that you create. It is the mastery of this world and the assertion of your soul in this world.

The meaning of events is the supreme meaning, that is not in events, and not in the soul, but in God standing between events and the soul, the mediator of life, the bridge and the going-across.

I like this idea of God standing “between events and the soul.” Events have no meaning, stuff just happens. Looking for meaning in the external world is pointless, so it has to be found in the internal world. In order to put to use all of the information you find in the internal world, you need to bring it outward and impress your soul upon the external world. God is the mediator that allows you to do that. God translates the language of the internal world into that of the external world, and vice-versa. That’s basically the alchemical process and/or Hero’s Journey right there — journey into the internal world, receive spiritual insight, bring it down. I’ve been struggling with that last part, but I know it’s doable.

And now, we finally get to Shadow work! I’m just going to transcribe this entire section:

Therefore I take part in that murder; the sun of the depths also shines in me after the murder has been accomplished; the thousand serpents that want to devour the sun are also in me. I myself am a murderer and murdered, sacrificer and sacrificed. The upwelling blood streams out of me.

You all have a share in the murder. In you the reborn one will come to be, and the sun of the depths will rise, and a thousand serpents will develop from your dead matter and fall on the sun to choke it. Your blood will stream forth. The peoples demonstrate this at the present time in unforgettable acts, that will be written with blood in unforgettable books for eternal memory.

But I ask you, when do men fall on their brothers with mighty weapons and bloody acts? They do such if they do not know that their brother is themselves. They themselves are sacrificers, but they mutually do the service of sacrifice. They must all sacrifice each other, since the time has not yet come when man puts the bloody knife into himself, in order to sacrifice the one he kills in his brother. But whom do people kill? They kill the noble, the brave, the heroes. They take aim at these and do not know that with these they mean themselves. They should sacrifice the hero in themselves, and because they do not know this, they kill their courageous brother.

The time is still not ripe. But through this blood sacrifice, it should ripen. So long as it is possible to murder the brother instead of oneself, the time is not ripe. Frightful things must happen until men grow ripe. But anything else will not ripen humanity. Hence all this that takes place in these days must also be, so that the renewal can come. Since the source of blood that follows the shrouding of the sun is also the source of the new life.

As the fate of the peoples is represented to you in events, so it will happen in your heart. If the hero in you is slain, then the sun of the depths rises in you, glowing from afar, and from a dreadful place. But all the same, everything that up till now seemed to be dead in you will come to life, and will change into poisonous serpents that will cover the sun, and you will fall into night and confusion. Your blood also will stream from many wounds in this frightful struggle. Your shock and doubt will be great, but from such torment the new life will be born. Birth is blood and torment. Your darkness, which you did not suspect since it was dead, will come to life and you will feel the crush of total evil and the conflicts of life that still now lie buried in the matter of your body. But the serpents are dreadful evil thoughts and feelings.

You thought you knew that abyss? Oh you clever people! It is another thing to experience it. Everything will happen to you. Think of all the frightful and devilish things that men have inflicted on their brothers. That should happen to you in your heart. Suffer it yourself through your own hand, and know that it is your own heinous and devilish hand that inflicts the suffering on you, but not your brother, who wrestles with his own devils.

I would like you to see what the murdered hero means. Those nameless men who in our day have murdered a prince are blind prophets who demonstrate in events what then is valid only for the soul. Through the murder of princes we will learn that the prince in us, the hero, is threatened. Whether this should be seen as a good or a bad sign need not concern us. What is awful today is good in a hundred years, and in two hundred years is bad again. But we must recognize what is happening: there are nameless ones in you who threaten your prince, the hereditary ruler.

But our ruler is the spirit of this time, which rules and leads in us all. It is the general spirit in which we think and act today. He is of frightful power, since he has brought immeasurable good to this world and fascinated men with unbelievable pleasure. He is bejeweled with the most beautiful heroic virtue, and wants to drive men up to the brightest solar heights, in everlasting ascent.

The hero wants to open up everything he can. But the nameless spirit of the depths evokes everything that man cannot. Incapacity prevents further ascent. Greater height requires greater virtue. We do not possess it. We must first create it by learning to live with our incapacity. We must give it life. For how else shall it develop into ability?

We cannot slay our incapacity and rise above it. But that is precisely what we wanted. Incapacity will overcome us and demand its share of life. Our ability will desert us, and we will believe, in the sense of the spirit of this time, that it is a loss. Yet it is no loss but a gain, not for outer trappings, however, but for inner capability.

The one who learns to live with his incapacity has learned a great deal. This will lead us to the valuation of the smallest things, and to wise limitation, which the greater height demands. If all heroism is erased, we fall back into the misery of humanity and into even worse. Our foundations will fall into the cesspool of our underworld, among the rubble of all the centuries in us.

The heroic in you is the fact that you are ruled by the thought that this or that is good, that this or that performance is indispensable, this or that cause is objectionable, this or that goal must be attained in headlong striving work, this or that pleasure should be ruthlessly repressed at all costs. Consequently you sin against incapacity. But incapacity exists. No one should deny it, find fault with it, or shout it down.

Jung is speaking in the context of the impending World Wars. That’s the blood sacrifice that he refers to, but everything he says here is also applicable to Shadow work more generally. The reason why people kill each other is because they project their own Shadows, their own Depths, onto each other. The heroes are the ones that die, because people become heroes by going to war and killing a bunch of people or by dying nobly in battle. In order to do Shadow work, you have to admit that you are complicit in this violence, and that you are both the killer and the victim. You’re the one holding the gun. When Jung says that he is both “murderer and murdered, sacrificer and sacrificed,” I’m reminded of Dionysus executing Pentheus by dismemberment, the same way he himself was murdered. I’m also reminded of how bulls and goats were named as representations of Dionysus himself before being sacrificed to him, sacrificing himself to himself. As far as I know, Dionysus is the only Ancient Greek god with that particular dynamic, that direct identification with the animals (and fictional people) sacrificed to him. All of the sacrifice and blood and death paves the way for resurrection and restoration, as it does in alchemy.

These lines are particularly striking: “You thought you knew that abyss? Oh you clever people! It is another thing to experience it. Everything will happen to you. […] Suffer it yourself through your own hand, and know that it is your own heinous and devilish hand that inflicts the suffering on you…” You thought you knew the dark? Oh, you don’t even know the dark, buddy. Not until you see the abyss staring back into you. The real truth is that you are heinous, you are devilish, you are the thing you fear the most and the thing you think you’re fighting against. “Oh you clever people!” is my new favorite insult. Cleverness won’t help you against your Shadow. Shadow is stark.

Facing the Shadow also requires the death of the hero, your “perfect” idealized image of yourself. The Zeitgeist wants you to rise to this ideal and become the most moral, the most pure, the most powerful, etc. But this is just unrealistic. You’re human, and you’re flawed. The way to transcend those flaws is to learn to live with them, maybe even turn them into advantages. But to do that, you have to admit that the flaws are there. No matter how much you may try to sort your actions and qualities into good and bad, useful and useless, meaningful and meaningless, or any other dichotomy, incapacity still exists. Whatever you’ve rejected will always exist, weighing you down, until you figure out how to turn your weaknesses into your greatest strengths. I love the idea of “sinning against incapacity” because it is so transgressive but also so true. You can sin against the dark, too, because the dark is also God.

More to come!

[differentnighttale]

Funny How This Is Love

Advisory: this is a poem written from the perspective of someone who hates love, sees it as poison and has horrid and hates it. This is just a literary work and the speaker, the character hates and blames women for some odd reason.

Also, I study both Literature and History in school, so I guess is to poke fun in both. 🙃 🫠

The mind of a writer is weird and complicated. It is mad and crazy indeed.

Now. Enjoy.

Funny How This is Love:

Funny how this love twists the heart, Blinds the strong, Breaks their will, Makes them grovel, Beg on their knees, Controls their actions, Easy to manipulate.

Made them lose all sense of reason, Hunger over needless words of gratifications, Forced them together like the world's end, Clashed our souls together, Meshed it.

Shatters deep motivations Ingrained deep, All because of wiles, words and pheromones. The stupid urge to reproduce, Let emotions guard the way, Let the heart wander, Made the legs fly. Made smart men stupid, Led them their deaths All because a creature sang You jumped in just to be with her Oh yes, Funny how this love,

Funny how this love Shattered kingdoms, Collapsed empires, Once great and strong, Pulled it out like a tablecloth.

Funny how this love flooded empires, Destroyed its monuments. Sank all the buildings, Drowned all those people.

Funny how this love made great kings made, Ruined their minds. Made them stupid. Hearts leeched by love.

Never were they dragged back down. It Ruins everything it touches.

We are animals you see, Wild and primitive, When one mate dies, We scout for another.

This love is replaceable, there is no such thing as that Hunger for more. Makes them a slave to them. Slices their heartstrings. Interwines their hearts. Ruins their goals. All for what.

A person to trample over them, Hurt them with words, Injurie them with the body, Ingrain them with lies. Oh yes what is this love. Intertwine bodies with lust, Craves each other's bodies. To their feelings driven by the animalistic mind. Fades over time. Then reality hits. The clock struck twelve. The future and hope faded away. It shackles them together. Two incompatible beings.

Funny how this love, Destroyed Egypt, Ruined empires. Blinded the strong made them weak. Destroyed all logic. Made a person hypnotized by their beauty, Their words, And bodies, Throw them on a pedestal and made them God, Reminds me of a great man, Who threw his whole work, A general in the army.

Now a man of love, Betrays his emperor, All because of her. His hunger for glory of Rome, To become to fateful ruler. That indecisive prick. His heart torn apart. Left the sister of he who had wedded, And took her heart too, Made it easy for the king to attack. All because of this love, For a queen. Lost a war. Then offed himself. All because he trusted her, A seductress, A power-hungry wrench, Bedded by many others.

Yes, funny how this love, Ruins all pure things, Taints them And destroys them, Oh yes, Funny how this love. The poison, This infection,

All because man cannot live alone. Man cannot be solitary. Of course, no man is an island,

Funny how this love Forced two kings to fight, Over a woman, Sworn to be a beauty, One kidnapped his love. Sent ships over the big wide ocean, Over his love to safe her, His men created a false horse, Used to lure the king, Stupidly let down his walls. Made him bare, Then ruined his kingdom, Maybe love isn't all that stupid, It forced a man to speak, To think, Funny how this love. Makes strong men weak. Blinded by delusions. Love Ruins all, Don't get infected.

PS:I had a creative spark in a threw hour train ride. Images found on Pinterest.