#disclaimer i do not hate gay people for real

[socalledsomethingorother]

i rewatched a shounen where protag and love interest get married in 10 episodes and find their child in the 11th

then i watched a slice of life for the 79th time where the protag and love interest get engaged in 10 episodes

now i’m 120+ episodes into a fucking show where the climax between the protag and love interest is gonna be these fuckers Finally Holding Hands

i hate gay people

[science-lings]

okay this has been going through my mind for days and I have to get my thoughts out before I explode

Disclaimer, this is not talking about a specific artist/person and would never condone or participate in anon hate or online bullying for any reason but especially this one. 

I get why people are mad about Link being portrayed as this buff, hypermasculine, tall guy. I am too (again don’t fucking attack people over it though) and it seems like such an infuriating way to change the character just to fit into some ideal of hypermasculine attractiveness or to make a ship fall into a more hetero lense by making him a decent foot taller than whatever girl he’s being paired with. 

The world of video games and action movies and every form of media ever is extremely saturated with male characters that are swole and manly and whatever other descriptors people are trying to push onto Link that don’t fit into his actual character. There are so many characters out there that already fit this male standard and having a clearly androgynous elf guy was like a breath of fresh air. 

Link was literally designed to be a character whose lines on gender were blurred, ‘a girl with a masculine touch or a guy with a feminine touch’ so that anyone could project themselves onto him. His physical design in botw/totk was specifically made to be feminine enough to wear a certain outfit to pass as a woman (which includes a nearly mandatory cutscene where he puts on the clothes and blushes after being called pretty, like you have to be blind to think that its an experience that he doesn’t like at all) and in totk there are a bunch of outfits made for Link that are blatantly gnc, ones that are practically dresses, include nail polish and lipstick, you can even dye his hair bright and vivid colors and that’s half way to giving him new pronouns. The whole reason Linkle isn’t included in more mainline loz games was because her existence would force Link into a gender dichotomy, if there's a clearly female version of the main hero, that means the main hero has to be a man, and they would rather abandon a potential reoccurring character than make Link conform to a gender binary. 

So pardon me when it feels disingenuous and even malicious for him to be morphed into these clear masculine ideals, where he towers over any female romantic partner (even when in canon he is regularly depicted as noticeably shorter than her) or even in m/m fanworks he’s really beefed up, perhaps to make the scene feel more gay or something. 

Perhaps it’s because his more twink-y/ femboy body type is so heavily sexualized (though obviously when people are sculping abs on him it’s totally not because they’re horny about it) and that’s an issue in itself that bothers me. But it’s just so tiring to see one of the very few popular main characters who is short and feminine and androgynous be molded into just another bland muscle-headed action hero over and over and over again. 

I’m not mad at the creators for portraying him differently than how I like him portrayed, I’m mad because we really do get so few characters like him in good popular media, and to be honest, I really like him the way that he is. I love that he’s tiny and has long hair and has the option to dress any way the player likes. It seems a little distasteful to make him taller than a female love interest just because that’s how straight couples have to be, there’s just never been a real straight couple where the guy is shorter than the girl, that’s just Impossible! (/s) 

[tippenfunkaport]

Today Variety (see above) had an article naming Heidi Schreck as the new writer for the live action She-Ra series at Amazon that was announced back in Sept 2021 and, after seeing dozens of terrible takes and people who are fans of the Netflix's She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2017) freaking out, let's talk about this, shall we?

Disclaimer that I do not have any insider knowledge of this project specifically, this is just my educated perspective from my experience with IP and TV.

First and foremost, I will believe this project is actually happening when it is showing on my TV and not a moment sooner. Let's just say that.

Now assuming it IS happening, here's what you should understand...

IP is usually use it or lose it. If Dreamworks wants to keep the rights to make She-Ra content, they very likely must have something in active development or risk listing it. If Netflix isn't willing to make more of the animated series right now, then the Amazon deal is all they have or give She-Ra up entirely. 

If you're an SPOP (2017) fan, you're in favor of Dreamworks retaining the license over losing it because, so long as they have it, the door is always open for more of our SPOP in one way or another. This reboot doesn't negate the possibility of a continuation of the animated version or vice versa. (Fans of frequently rebooted properties like TMNT and MLP would be happy to tell you about how there's been content for multiple gens at the same time.) It's not like the new version erases the old. If anything, a reboot often makes it more likely you get content of a past gen because of renewed interest in the property as a whole.

"But what if it's sexist trash!" The biggest fear people had about this reboot was that it would be some male gaze disaster made to please the worst kind of people who hate all kinds of diversity. Obviously, we'll see what we get, but the fact that they specifically got a feminist playwright as the writer is a big thing should alleviate some of that fear.

"But will it be gay????" I've seen lots of freaking out that Adora's going to kill Catra and marry a man on her grave and other equally unlikely fears. And the fact is: We don't know if it will be gay! With this writer, the gay door certainly isn't closed, but that doesn't mean it's open either. But honestly the real question you should be asking is: will it be explicitly gay? Because the rainbow homo-eroticism is baked right into She-Ra OG so even if we don't get an explicit same-sex kiss on screen... it's likely still gonna be pretty gay.

Even a bad or infuriating reboot will revitalize the fandom and bring new fans to SPOP (2017) AND increase the chances of continuation. Say the new show is terrible. Say they annoy everyone by giving Catra and Adora a supercorp queerbaiting thing and then never make it canon or make Catra and Hordak in love and everyone is mad. (Which I feel obligated to point out is *extremely* unlikely as this is literally still Dreamworks' show. They are the same people that gave you the gay. They are keenly aware of what their audience wants so, even if they are reluctant to make it canon, at the least they are probably going to tease it.) But even in the worst case scenario of the straightest possible version of She-Ra, what are people going to do if the new show pisses them off? Turn back to She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, create more fanworks, interact with what's already there, keep the fandom alive for everyone. You want that!

"Well SPOP (2017) was perfect and they should never be allowed to make another version of She-Ra again unless it's just like the thing we just got!" Wow, where have I heard something like that before? Oh yeah, that's exactly what the nightmare chuds said about Netflix's She-Ra and if they had gotten their way, we wouldn't have had this show we love. So maybe take a nice deep breath, chill tf out and look at that fact that there is no reason yet to see this announcement as anything other than a good thing for both this new reboot and the animated version's future.

[raayllum]

Amaya's arc (S1-S5)

On the surface, Amaya can come off as a very flawless character.

She's a total badass, she's gay and pretty, she sees through Viren's bullshit (er, droppings?), she's kind to those in her employ, she's loyal and forthcoming, she loves her nephews and her sister, and she's not unreasonable in her elf prejudice in addition to letting go of it fairly quickly. She's also Deaf / perceived as disabled (noted here as many Deaf people do not view themselves as disabled) and, in addition to being gay, that can sometimes make people overly sanitize a character due to notions of disability making someone (particularly women) more 'innocent' or 'pure' due to infantilization.

However, I've touched briefly on her main flaw of being callous and dismissive in the past, and I've always wanted to talk more about Amaya's general arc, specifically in how she grows in empathy throughout the seasons. So let's talk about it

Just a quick disclaimer: S2 will not be really touched on as she only appears in two episodes, and they mostly serve as plot set up for S3 rather than doing any real emotional work or characterization for her. Cool? Cool

Cyclical Limbo

Amaya in S1 both perpetuates the Cycle, and she doesn't. On the one hand, like Viren, she's deeply concerned with the safety of the Breach, enough so that she's willing to return to it and delegate the search mission to Gren rather than insist upon undertaking it herself.

She hates elves and considers them monsters, much the way Claudia does in S1. In spite of a lifetime of fighting Sunfire elves at the Breach, she considers Moonshadow elves to be "the worst kind" of elf, like a monolith of loathing and fear (perhaps because of their sneaky ways or associations with death).

At the same time, she's not purely an antagonistic force to anyone. Corvus, her trusted tracker, offers Rayla a deal that shows reason ("Give me the boys peacefully and I'll let you go") and, more importantly, she foils Viren's plans to be king with her entry and reaffirmation in 1x04 and 1x05. This leads to him not having the throne all the way until two seasons later, and is undeniably a good thing.

So while Amaya is an ally to the boys and an antagonist to Viren, this plants her firmly in the middle, of both perpetuating the cycle and helping to stop others from perpetuating it. We see her increased antagonism with the Sunfire elves in s2 lean along the former vein as well.

Until of course, we don't, and we get to the heart of Amaya's arc:

Seeing Yourself In Your Enemy

This is most evident in some ways in season three and season five, with season four being an effective turning point in a dual sort of way. We see this most clearly in her bond with Janai, as Amaya sees a fellow warrior in her and that encourages Janai "to do the same" over warrior's honour. The show ramps this up in 3x07, as Amaya witnesses and comforts Janai through the most devastating loss in Amaya's loss: that of a sister.

A: When I was growing up, my big sister Sarai was the smartest, strongest, bravest person I knew. When she died, I felt lost and weak without her. I hated feeling that way, so I learned to be strong alone. Stoic, strong, and lonely.

From this point onwards, her and Janai are allies in going to the Storm Spire and in fighting Viren. It's worth noting that Amaya had no knowledge of or reason to expect finding the boys when she arrived there, so she'd clearly decided to throw her lot in entirely with Janai and her troops and fight "until the last [person] standing" alongside them.

However, Amaya's expanding heart and loyalty doesn't mean all her elf related biases disappear overnight (the same Karim's reservations about humans don't), and this is where we get to season four. Much like in season one, Amaya here stands in a limbo position. She's marrying into the elven royal family, but isn't aligned with all their traditions, most notably the full significance of the Soul Candle and initially foreshadowed due to the messed up proposal dance.

Amaya is at first solely on Lucia's side, which makes sense; Amaya is more practical than not, and this is part of the reason she can make quick and fast but strong alliances and see through Viren's bullshit.

However, her old flaw of being dismissive and sometimes insensitive also comes back.

A: What do you mean 'injustice'? All Lucia has done is put out a candle. And she was the one who was burned. K: She profaned a sacred rite. What would the punishment be in the human kingdoms? A: For blowing out a candle? Usually come clapping, followed by a slice of birthday cake. K: You see? This is the problem! Like all the other humans, even your wife-to-be thinks this is a joke.

That said, it's not as though Amaya is wrong; we are, of course, supposed to understand immediately as audience members that while what Lucia did was wrong, sentencing her to death over it is also wrong and to root for her to live (even if, at this point, she likewise doesn't think she's done anything wrong).

I think it's doubly worth noting then, her speech at the trial that she gives for Lucia, and about herself:

I came here to defend Lucia, but now I see that I cannot. She is not innocent. Prince Karim is correct: she had every opportunity to consider the pain she could cause, and she did not. She was callous. She was careless. She was cruel. And in truth...

She places herself in Lucia's shoes. This is her amends to Karim for her insensitivity, and an extension of both support and consideration for the position Jana is in, as well as a plea.

But all I ask is that your justice is compassionate. Death is not the answer. We gain nothing if we throw away the chance to learn and grow.

This is, of course, a lesson Amaya has learned personally, through her relationship with Janai — first as an enemy turned friend, then as a lover turned wife — but, of course, through her relationship with Rayla, which she first hand acknowledges in S5:

But her arc with this general theme of empathy doesn't stop there. Not only is there a nice piece of irony with Amaya initially not believing Rayla's assertion that she's alone (even when Rayla arguably does):

A: 'We'? How many of you are there? R: It's just me. I'm alone. A: Liar.

5x04 gives the two women a chance to talk and reconcile beyond that, with Amaya reminding Rayla that she doesn't have to be alone, and that she can rely on the people around her. Namely, the very nephew Amaya once attacked Rayla to protect.

A: Love and trust grow a kind of strength that is much bigger than we each possess. To have that kind of strength, it is not enough to love someone. You have to trust them to share the burdens you carry.

Likewise, this scene also brings Amaya's arc of seeing herself in others full circle, as this parallel makes plain, as well as it being a parallel that Rayla is not only able to acknowledge, but it gets through to her:

R: That does sound like me sometimes. [...] Thank you.

While Amaya can still be coarse and is undeniably clever, she's softer, more open, and more compassionate than she was two years ago. Elves are no longer monsters. People are far more capable of change, herself included, her adaptability to life and its sudden swerves in many ways one of her greatest strengths. Amaya is a warrior yes, but more than that — like her friends and family, the people she surrounds herself with — she has an even bigger heart, when given the chance.

[doing-swell]

hello, my name's swellie 💖✨🌈 aka: new pinned post! new pinned post! read all abt it!

welcome to my blog! I started on here almost exactly a year ago, and since then I've learned not only so much about my pregnancy kink, but also about myself. being here has been formative for my kink exploration journey, and it's helped me deconstruct years of catholic school girl trauma (s/o to catholic guilt!).

This is a pregnancy and birth fetish vlog. This is an 18+ only environment. DO NOT INTERACT IF 18 OR YOUNGER. I am a 27 year old white cis woman with brown hair. I identify as a neurodivergent bisexual woman on the ace-spectrum. I live in the US - New England specifically!

I've had a pregnancy kink since I was a kid. I even got in trouble for google image searching "pregnat" on my childhood computer lol (it was 2006 folks, what else was i supposed to do?) I created this blog to share the beautiful side of this kink. I hope you enjoy! <3

Keep reading below!

As a queer person I will absolutely not condone any form of homophobia, transphobia, racism, misogyny, etc etc. I am an open and tolerant person, and please do not try to take advantage of me because of this. I mostly only follow back people whose content I enjoy seeing.

When I interact with kink content here, I mostly imagine myself as the pregnant carrier. I mostly get off to picturing myself in some sort of pain (i.e. labor) or I like to picture myself with a pregnant person.

Things I really enjoy:

Wearing a fake pregnant belly

Pregnant bellies (specifically, large pregnant bellies, smaller bellies, those with stretch marks, red bellies, moving bellies)

Breeding <3

Impregnation <3

Poking pregnant bellies, rubbing them etc

Stirrups, medical torture stuff, etc (FANTASY ONLY. I CANNOT REPEAT THAT ENOUGH. DO NOT INTERACT WITH ME IF YOU FEEL OTHERWISE)

Birth, birth denial, labor and contractions

Pregnant lesbians (because duh,,, I’m fucking gay)

Historical pregnancies or pregnancies set in the past

Clothes not being able to fit/spilling out of old clothes

Giant swollen boobs (especially with veins 🙈)

Giant bellies in laps <3

Waddling and being out of breathe, struggling to sit up, contractions, unable to get up from sitting, etc

Curves🤤🤤

I’m not into:

Anime/ drawings

Monster fucking, slime, pups/litter talk, etc

Mpreg

Beastiality, aliens, monsters, anything sci fi

Eggs or pushing out objects

Feederism, feedies, or stuffing (in very very specific circumstances I tolerate this)

Anything to do with fatphobia or shaming folks for their size/weight

Swollen feet

It gets weird when it gets misogonistic in a "I would actually vote to overturn roe v wade if I had the chance" kind of thing -- if it's fantasy/pure imagination, I'm all ears. But when I think you would actually hate crime me IRL..... that's when I [not-so] politely decline ❤️🫶🏻

Other disclaimers:

I am in a relationship right now and she knows about this blog and my kink. She is so supportive and I love her very much. We are very open to exploring ourselves sexually, but never, and I mean never, would I risk my relationship because of something on here. If you cross a line, I will immediately tell you. Please do not assume I want to fuck you or be in a relationship with you in real life, this is purely for kink purposes. I think of you as my friends! If I talk to you, or respond to your DM's or like your content occasionally, that means I'm grateful to have you in my life and you make my life better by being in it. Xoxo, thank you for understanding!

Please send me asks, tell me about your fantasies, ask me questions about my fetish. I want to learn more about you as well! I’m an open book when it comes to most things, I promise I won’t judge you 🙈

I don’t want to tell you my real name, where I live, or anything about me in real life. You won’t ever see my face. It’s what I’m comfortable with, full stop. If you do get my name or anything from me, it’s for you only. Do not share that without my consent. For purposes of this blog, you can call me Swellie 🤪

I love interacting with mutuals through tags and captions 💋 it’s my way of flirting and will swoon if you do the same

Happy swelling, babies 🫡

[stillness-in-green]

What do you think about Horikoshi ending the manga without a canon couple? Do you ship or used to ship MHA characters? Did you see romantic potential? Do you think Horikoshi might confirm a couple later?

No canon couple?  Au contraire, my dear anon!  The manga ended with the most important canonization of all!

(Everybody give a huge hand to The Only Hets Who Matter, Gentle and La Brava; they deserve it.)

As to the ships people actually care about or were expecting some word on (e.g. the stuff with the students), my reaction there is overwhelmingly “lol gj hori”.  I’m glad he ended it with no canon student couple to speak of!  While I do sympathize with the position of certain people on Twitter who contend that Ochaco’s arc about repression really needed her to actually confess to Deku, I hated what her crush on Deku did to her arc anyway, so I don’t have it in me to be too annoyed.  Anyway, I don’t think it’s possible to do the Iron Might 2.0 part of the epilogue if Deku and Ochaco[1] have been dating the entire time, so I’m perfectly happy to run with the headcanon that she did confess at one point and it didn’t work out for whatever reason, so by the time the last chapter rolls around, they’ve just been friends for years.

1: Or Bakugou, for that matter, but with all due respect to the BakuDekus who haven’t been seeing Shonen Jump battle manga come and go for twenty years with nary a confirmed gay MC amongst them, that was never in the cards.

I remember posting once ages ago about a Japanese fan’s hope that Horikoshi, who the fan perceived as being at least somewhat progressive about women, could manage to end the series without a bunch of timeskip romances showing up at the last minute.  While I have some deep reservations about Hori’s progressive cred at this point in time, and am not tremendously impressed with his writing of women, either, credit where credit is due: he did end the series without any timeskip romances.

As to there being any confirmation of couples in the material we have remaining, I imagine the last train station[2] for that is going to be the final volume release in December, as, on top of the usual volume extras, Horikoshi should be considerably more free to include expansions that his schedule and exhaustion kept him from in the weekly publication.  I could even see a bonus chapter of some sort, maybe something post-epilogue so we can see the power suit in action or something silly and fourth wall-breaking to celebrate the series conclusion.  There’s also going to be one last fanbook released in January, which I have been assuming will be a data book like Ultra Archive.

2: Or harbor, I suppose, since we’re talking about ships.

Now, do I think any of that stuff will confirm ships?  Eh, that’s not really in my analytical wheelhouse.  The farthest I’d venture to guess is that I would a) not be surprised to get some clarification on Deku and Ochaco, and b) definitely peg the volume release to have material like that over squirreling it away in the fanbook.

For myself, my shipping habits are somewhat erratic—it’s not really where my primary engagement in media lies, and certainly not for this series!  But that’s not to say I don’t have ships, or that I’m not happy to talk about them, so if you’re curious about that, do feel free to hit the jump.  I’ll order them by general sphere first, then by how passionate I am about them compared to ones I just think are kinda cute or funny for whatever reason.

DISCLAIMER: While I have not explicitly stated as much here before, I am a 40-year-old asexual proshipper, proshipper here meaning I'm in favor of curating your own fandom space and not harassing people about their fictional ships under any circumstances.  When I say I ship something, that does not mean I’m idealizing the relationship, want it to be canon, think it would be cool in real life, or am mentally putting myself in the place of one the characters.  It’s solely because there’s something in the dynamic I think is fun or interesting, and “interesting” can very much include the same kind of interest one might have in watching a building get demolished. 

That is to say, there are a handful of Too Problematic For Tumblr ships in here—one age gap but otherwise wholesome, one age gap and tacitly abusive, and one that really hits the Tumblr Trifecta by being age gap, abusive and incestuous. I've put all three at the very bottom in their own section in descending order of Most BadWrong, but if you’re one of those people deep into The Discourse about how ships need to be Morally Correct otherwise the shippers are terrible people who should kys, this is not the post for you.  The block button’s there if you need it—and be advised that it’s there if I need it, too, and I’m not afraid to use it. (I grew up in dark fantasy shoujo fandoms; I am not litigating my ships with anybody.)

~~~Stillness’s Dubious and Delightful BNHA Ship Opinions~~~

Villain-o-rama-rama:

Spinarakiya, ShigaRD, Spinaraki: Alas for my short-lived OT3!  I was really, really pumped for this in the stretch between MVA and the early stages of the first war, what with there being such interesting possible angles between all three parties, only for Re-Destro to get arrested and never seen in person again, Spinner to get snatched up by Gigantomachia and never look back, and Shigaraki to get lost to the possession plot for, at least as far as scenes with his allies were concerned, basically the rest of the series.

Not exactly great material for my shipping heart, though I’ll refrain from the rant comparing how long the PLF members were living in close contact with each other compared to the League of Villains and why that should have meant they developed stronger relationships than what we got.

But canon being what it is, I do still ship the hell out of these three in a canon divergence situation, or any number of potential AUs.  I love the connective tissue there, with Re-Destro + Shigaraki having some startlingly strong background parallels and lasting injuries courtesy of each other, Shigaraki + Spinner having the gaming and the emptiness themes, and Spinner + Re-Destro having their Big Gay Feelings About Shigaraki as well as an appreciation for patterned fabrics some shared early frustrations about Shigaraki’s seeming lack of plans or direction.

It's a good dynamic, and I think they could all do a lot for each other, though certainly not in ways that are good for the continued survival of Hero Society.  But fuck Hero Society anyway.

As to the component parts, I don’t ship Re-Destro and Spinner without Shigaraki being at least an invisible part of the dynamic (though I would read the fic where he wasn’t with considerable interest!), but I’m also very much on board with ShigRD and Spinaraki individually.  My constant refrain about Shigaraki and RD is that they have a lot of common ground but very little common language, and I’m fascinated by how much of that they could recognize in each other and how much of it they could then recognize back in themselves, versus how much you’d get one of those cases of, “This guy is a freak and I’m so normal.”

It's so, so, so important to me that Re-Destro is the first ally Shigaraki won entirely on his own merits.  He's got no borrowed reputation from Stain, no monsters on loan from Sensei, and no help from people on Sensei’s payroll, yet still, as a result of his efforts (both in his own fights and in making the League his own, even if it didn’t start that way) he wins himself an army and a follower who never saw a light that wasn’t his.

I weep for the Shigaraki/Re-Destro relationship we could have had if Horikoshi didn’t decide that Shigaraki in the endgame was to be nothing but a pawn, and therefore couldn’t be allowed to keep any of his markers of independence and growth.

As to Spinaraki, man, what is there even to say?  The relationship so clear and obvious that it had even the mhatwt bros out there saying, “Spinaraki but at what cost?” in the last chapter!  I will admit that I liked them better when their romance had that apocalyptic tinge than when it suddenly started getting painted as primarily about them being Gamer Bros, but at least that melancholic “beauty at the end of the world” shading came back when Shigaraki talked about destroying Mount Fuji for Spinner (be still my heart!).    

They will meet and be close in every world and I will hear nothing else.

RiKoku: I don’t think I truly understood the appeal of ex-lover ships until these two.  They snuck up on me in a big way, pretty much entirely a result of my realization when I was halfway through the (first and only, sadly) MLA Week event that Trumpet was pretty free-roaming and independent from Re-Destro all the way through Deika only to be glued to his side from there on out.  Together with the Spinner parallels (the subordinates who fought each other and then came together to the crater to see their worlds remade) and my jokes about wanting to see the MLA heads during their stressed-out, over-achiever college years, all the pieces fell into place for a Rikiya and Koku who had dated for a few years and then broken up when Rikiya realized that his authority as Re-Destro—and Koku’s strong subordination to that authority—meant that he could not responsibly stay in the relationship.  (This also presents several good explanations for why a man in Rikiya’s situation isn’t married with at least one child already.)

Anyway, to me, they never really fell out of love with each other; Re-Destro just couldn’t justify overlooking the power dynamic problems once he realized how extreme they were.  (This does make for a fun alternate angle on RD’s personal life post-Deika, wherein Trumpet watches RD pass the mantle of leadership to Shigaraki Tomura and then more or less immediately pounces on him because now he doesn’t have the power dynamic excuse anymore.  Look up the great Whatever Is Spared by @leftofrevolution on AO3 for more on this.)

Overhonest: I just like Nemoto much more than I like Chrono, and thus my Overhaul ship of choice follows suit.  I like the idea that their feelings are wildly unbalanced but not totally one-sided—Overhaul has more baggage than a freshly loaded airport carousel, but he does like the Shie Hassaikai, as proven by them being mentioned in the Likes section of his character page. Nemoto in particular is someone whose presence we know Overhaul finds reassuring and we know it because he told Nemoto so directly when Nemoto asked, which means it can’t be anything other than the plain truth.  He relies on Nemoto enough to make demands of him, he expects (and gets!) effectiveness, and he even bothers to take the time to justify out loud why it would be okay for him to merge himself with Nemoto physically (because Nemoto would say yes if asked, right? of course he would) rather than just doing it with no thought to Nemoto’s feelings about it because why should he care about that.

And Nemoto, for his part, is of course an obsessive weirdo who’s totally smitten with the first person he’s ever found who legitimately wants him around, so smitten that he’ll happily overlook the fact that Overhaul primarily wants him around because he’s useful.

Moving away from what’s on-the-page canon, I enjoy (and write) the take that Overhaul is sex-repulsed, not because he’s fully asexual, but as an extension of his mysophobia.  This makes his sex life extremely fraught, but not non-existent.  When I dabble with writing them (and they’re by far the ship I’ve written the most explicit material for in this fandom), I write him as basically a sex-repulsed demi (not that he would know or use that terminology!) who is attracted to Nemoto but has been largely left aggravated and sexually frustrated by their periodic experiments in non-traditional ways of getting him off.  (Nemoto, for his part, is more than willing to keep trying!  No kink is too weird for this guy if it means finding something Overhaul would actually like.)

(To get real here for a second, if Spinarakiya is meaningful to me as a person who’s comfortably poly, Overhonest is meaningful to me as an asexual person who's only ever had allosexual partners.)

AFOUji: Truly the Evil Husbands of all time.  I wish the shift from Final Boss Shigaraki to Final Boss AFO hadn’t left Ujiko with a few truly inexplicable characterization beats,[3] because I truly do love these two as just the worst pair of mutually enabling monsters making the world worse and more dangerous for everyone while being 100% supportive of each other’s passions the entire time.  Here’s to 70 years of Dark Lord/Mad Scientist domestic bliss.

3: For the record, I consider these to be his, “I've only been living for the boy's sake,” line in Chapter 269 and his clear reticence and dissastisfaction with Shigaraki getting the surgery in Chapter 240.

DabiSkep: Skeptic is the only man Dabi has ever thanked for his contributions.�� Dabi goes out of his way to kidnap him.  I’m 90% convinced that they’d been working on the video together prior to the Villa raid.  The combination of Skeptic’s deep and abiding neuroticism with Dabi’s swings between lazy malice and manic pushiness is extremely funny.  What can I say; it’s just about the only Dabi ship that really clicks for me.  I enjoy leftof’s take that Skeptic had a goth phase he never completely exited and so Dabi appeals to his inner Hot Topic teen, which he is 100% aware of and 150% embarrassed by.

   

School Environs:

Mirio/Tamaki: Tamaki literally regains consciousness at the exact moment Mirio loses his quirk.  Other than cases where there’s some actual explanation for that—a magical connection, psychic powers, etc.—I have never seen that kind of beat happen outside of a shoujo manga.  The bit where one romantic lead just mysteriously has a Bad Feeling in the same instant that something Bad happens to their love interest is so shoujo-coded.  Jesus Christ, Tamaki is so moe.  And Mirio so clearly thinks the world of him, too, as evinced by what an over-the-top sobriquet he dubbed Tamaki with.  They’re great, end of story.

Monoma/Shinsou: I’ll admit I liked this somewhat better when I thought there was any chance at all Shinsou might end up in Class B—I kind of loathe that he wound up in Class A for the self-evidently terrible reason that it’s The Main Character Class, when it seems so obviously a conflict of interest for Aizawa to be teaching him.  But eh, it’s okay; it just means Monoma will have to nobly learn to look past it after a lot of time spent being completely obnoxious about it.

My annoyance with Shinsou’s class placement aside, Monoma is one of my favorite students, and I like that he immediately latches onto Shinsou as a kindred spirit.  And, like, if that were 100% one-directional, I would probably shrug it off, but Shinsou, despite trying to play at being aloof, does actually get invested enough that he gets pretty bothered by the idea of Monoma needing help, even in something as inconsequential as a class exercise.  It’s just a much, much more interesting dynamic than Shinsou has with Deku or especially Kaminari.

Also, as someone with a bit of a Thing for mind fuckery, the way Copy and Brainwash can play off each other is Good.

MomoJirou: The fanart is cute and I like Momo better than Kaminari.  And the culture clash thing is fun.

Shouto/Inasa: The fanart is cute and I like Inasa better than Deku or Bakugou.

   

Professional Sphere:

Hawksdeavor:The age gap adds flavor.  The fact that Endeavor is still married but deeply unhappily so makes it even spicier.  The difference in what they represent (or could potentially represent) to each other is the best part, with Hawks, for Endeavor, being someone who represents a totally clean page, while Endeavor, for Hawks, represents a lifelong adoration.  Finding each other’s reality in all of that would be an interesting relationship arc and could be extremely fulfilling and strengthening for both of them.

The spoiler is (or at least should have been, if I’d been writing the series) their divided feelings on Dabi.  Honestly, I really wanted to see them clash over the matter of Touya and how to deal with him, with Endeavor wanting to save him but not knowing how and Hawks just wanting him gone but not knowing how to get away with it.  A certain pair of facts is glaring to me: first, that Hawks was a chief architect of the second war’s battle plans, whereas we never saw Endeavor involved with them at all, and second, that, when the big day came, Endeavor was slated to fight All For One with Hawks at his side despite at least some guilty protests from Enji that he really ought to be facing Dabi.

It smacks strongly of Hawks making some profoundly selfish decisions under the guise of clear-headed strategy and I really wanted it to blow up in his face when Dabi found his way to their battlefield anyway.  Pushing Endeavor into a place where he had to choose between them and ultimately chose his son (say, by protecting him from an attack coming from Hawks) would have been validating for Touya, done a lot to lever Endeavor’s arc out of the reactiveness and passivity that drag it down so badly in the canon, and also handed Hawks a real consequence for how dismissively he treats the lives of Villains and how much he’s tried to avoid reckoning with both Endeavor’s abuse and Enji’s own attempts to do said reckoning!

In summary, Hawks and Endeavor could be very good for each other, and the incredible amount of baggage they’d have work through first would be key to either making that good ending feel earned or lead to them dramatically and deliciously imploding.  Either one works for me, and either one, even without the romantic angle, would have been more interesting than the pablum we got.

NightMight: Speaking of could-have-been-good relationships that dramatically imploded!  I love Sir Nighteye as the most visible cost of All Might’s lifestyle, the one he lost because he couldn’t step away from the path his ideals had set out, and how that ideal inevitably took him full circle so that he found himself standing, for Deku, in the same place Nighteye once stood for him.  And of course by then it was too late and Deku wouldn’t listen to him anymore than he himself listened to Nighteye back then.

But Nighteye didn’t give up on caring about him, even if he had no avenue left to express it but throwing himself into finding a successor All Might would accept, which led to Nighteye's own (wonderful) relationship with Mirio.

Just great, difficult, adult stuff about irreconcilable differences that never stopped them from caring about each other even as those differences forced them to their parting of ways.

Mount Lady/Kamui Woods: They’re cute and I like the idea that they both have trouble, for opposite reasons, with cameramen.  I like that he calls her just Lady when he thinks she’s in trouble.  And not to put too fine a point on it, but I like that they’re kinda the most explicit Pro Hero couple and yet she’s the more prominent and important character with the more visible arc, which is a nice contrast to most of the other hetero relationships in this benighted manga.

   

Other/Cross-faction:

Togachaco: The yuri ship that could.  My god, the canon divergence I want to give these two.  You know why I want Deku and Ochaco to not be together in the end?  Because I want Ochaco to realize that she did everything in her power to save her Villain while Deku—after all that talk on the cliff!—just killed his, and triggered Toga just before he left to do it, meaning Ochaco had a harder time with Toga than she might have otherwise.

But, I’m not here to talk about No. 2 Green; let’s talk instead about the canon divergence where Toga survives (shove that absurd death-via-blood-transfusion right into the incinerator) and then Ochaco has to come face to face with a system that does not want to let her be anywhere near as kind as she wants to be.  The canon divergence where Ochaco realizes that her forgiveness is immaterial to justice, where she watches the system she fought to defend gear up to try Toga as an adult because Japan needs a scapegoat for the destruction of the war and all of the people who are actually most responsible are already dead or dying.  Where Ochaco realizes that she has to do something drastic if she doesn’t want to live the rest of her life haunted by the knowledge that her compassion got a 17-year-old victim of emotional and psychiatric abuse executed by the state.  The one where she decides to take a fucking stand, and it forces the rest of her class to confront that need as well.

“The cutest girl in the whole world,” my god.

Kotarou and Nao: I’m not as big on it by the time we’re seeing them in the Tenko flashback, though I certainly wasn’t pulling for some mean-spirited, allegedly feel-good “Nao slaps Kotarou and the whole family walks out of him” thing like you see in fanfic sometimes.  No, what I really like with Kotarou and Nao is thinking about them when they’re both still young, in the stretch of years where they really think they'll be happy together.  That her being with him can make all his problems go away, that him being able to bury his past and be better than all the people who hurt him (and there were so many people who hurt him) will be enough, that love is the answer to everything. Sure, the cracks are there, but they’re thin, and they can be hidden beneath all the days when things are good, when the two of them hold each other and feel safe and loved and sure.

The cracks are still there, and love isn’t enough when love becomes a band-aid and a blind eye.  But the love is still there too, and it’s so fierce and so desperate, and it still won’t save them.

Sorry, everyone; they make me emotional.  They are beautiful in the way of sparks dancing above flames, or early flowers blooming right before a vicious cold snap.  Ah, me.

StainMight: GOD, All Might really needed to grapple more with Stain’s side of his legacy.  Like, StainMight is really a victim of the way the story looked like it was setting up to criticize All Might’s methodology as well-intended but not sustainable long-term, but then, like every other aspect of the series that was about systemic critique, that criticism just evaporated and Stain became an All Might cheerleader with nothing to say about the system All Might supported for thirty years.  Maddening!  But for real, All Might should have been badly hurt in that car attack and then rescued by Stain, both to give Deku some stress about how All Might could be in danger after they parted on bad terms, and also to really make All Might have to sit with this opinionated zealot all-too-prepared to talk about how no one else is really living up to his example.

And there should be UST the whole time.

Yoichi and Kudou: I am almost entirely negative towards the OFA Collective these days, especially Kudou’s role in the endgame, but I still have some fondness for what he and Yoichi could have been.  My god, the first One For All transfer really should have been because they kissed.  More beautiful, more tragic, more profound, and preserves the Yoichi that had some actual fucking agency in the life he lived instead of just constantly being AFO’s or Kudou’s trophy princess there to talk about how respectively terrible and awesome they are.

TogaTsuyu: I just think it would be interesting if Tsuyu were actually allowed to be more present in the Toga plotline, rather than only arriving as a spoiler to avert major shifts every time.  Toga says she likes Tsuyu, too, after all, and Tsuyu is so different from both Ochaco and Deku, so much more thoughtful and considered.  I dunno, I just wonder how things might have gone if, for example, it had been Tsuyu that Toga managed to draw away in the Jakku fight.  Given that side story with her snakey friend Habuko, evidence suggests that Tsuyu is a good deal more observant and intuitive than Ochaco, and I wonder if she might have been able to suss out what Toga was actually asking there better than Ochaco did, and how that might have changed things.

   

.

.

.

   

THE TUMBLR PROBLEMATIC ZONE:

Gentle Criminal and La Brava: I was willing to follow the canon’s initial vagary about these two, but I also like them quite a bit together, so if canon wants to put them in wedding rings at the end of the series, that’s fine by me!  Yes, I’m aware that there’s a pretty significant age gap there, which would have been at its most apparent when she first sought him out, but I don’t for one single instant believe that he’d be anything less than a total gentleman to her.  Indeed, it’d be entirely plausible to mount an argument based on his behavior that they were not at all romantically involved circa the Culture Festival arc,[4] and only become so after Gentle’s imprisonment and subsequent release.  But in general, what I’m more concerned with is the dynamic—I regard a power differential in a relationship as a reason for both parties to be cautious and mindful of that differential, but not as an immediate game-ender.

4: Most obvious is that when she says, “I love you,” he only says things like, “Thank you,” in return.

In that sense, Gentle and La Brava are great—they click together perfectly and obviously make each other tremendously happy after a lifetime of rejection.  La Brava, in Gentle’s theatrical attention-seeking, finds someone who accepts her overflowing way of showing love; Gentle, in living up to La Brava’s feelings, finds a reason for his skewed heroism beyond satisfying his pride.  To whatever extent their life together was heading anywhere bad (and there’s no evidence of this at all save that Heroes were always likely to catch up to them eventually, making La Brava’svery extreme response to Gentle’s defeat likewise inevitable), Deku’s intervention got them off of that path and back onto one that let them be accepted by the world, which they seem to have capitalized on marvelously.

They’re the only Villains I can think of whose turn to Team Hero in the endgame works for me without any significant quibbles.  Good for them!  I hope they are so, so happy together, because they deserve it.

AFO and Kotarou: MEANWHILE, IN MY OTHER KOTAROU SHIP.  I love AFO knowing Everything about what he’s doing here while Kotarou knows absolutely Nothing about what AFO is doing here.  I love an AFO who is self-amused in being friendly and reassuring and distractingly attractive to Kotarou, an AFO who knows that his toying with Kotarou would make Shimura Nana sick with terror and rage, and even if she isn’t alive to be so anymore, the fantasy of it is satisfying enough, especially since Kotarou is himself a very handsome young man, one whose hurt and resentment AFO finds beguiling to sometimes prod at, as if unable to leave a bruise alone except the bruise isn’t on his own skin.

I have an AU I’m never likely to write where Kotarou winds up successfully knocking out Tenko on the night of the accident before going on the run with him, only for them to get picked up by AFO a few weeks later, and let me tell you guys, that’s where all my guilty pleasure AFO/Kotarou really lives.

That said, I liked this one much better before we got the opening for it in canon, and not just because AFO’s disguise persona was doofy-looking instead of devastatingly handsome.  It was always one of those ships that tickled my inner hedonistic wickedness fancier but that I never wanted to be canon because my affection for the ship's vibe was not more important to me than the integrity of Shigaraki’s arc, and Shigaraki’s arc was far better served by his early childhood being as free from AFO as possible.  Alas, the reveal is very AFOtarou but at what cost.

Dabideavor: Sorry not sorry everyone, but all the people screaming about how this is SICK FILTH seem to have missed the point that it is indeed, absolutely and completely, sick filth and that’s part of the appeal.  Personally, I like it for two main reasons.

Firstly, I want Endeavor to have as hard a time as possible, and times don't get harder than this. I enjoy it when he's frozen and helpless in the face of the son whose life he destroyed because I have a long history of enjoying stoic male characters being made vulnerable through suffering.

Secondly, and more importantly, I like it because I like the version of Dabi you see in it, particularly compared to the Fanon Dabi who made so much League of Villains fan content un-fucking-readable for years.

I'm going to try to keep the hot fandom tea to a minimum here, limited to the upcoming footnote, but I hated Fanon Dabi.[5] He was an incoherent mash of a character designed to be a vehicle for the unabashed revenge fantasy of bloody murder against Bad Dads while also presenting no danger whatsoever of splash damage, a Woobie Big Brother who was completely harmless except to the father whose organs he was planning to paint the walls with. Every excuse that could be made, would be made, for Dabi's more questionable or even outright nasty moments, even if it meant minimizing or outright erasing the harm we saw Dabi do, right there on the page in literal manga monochrome.

5: There's a particular type of flanderization that goes into Fanon Dabi, the same kind of flanderization I saw attached to Steven Universe's Lapis Lazuli, and which informed the absolute umbrage certain people took with Rebecca Sugar for describing Spinel, the SU movie's villain, as toxic. There is a portion of fandom that loves abuse victims who get angry and lash out, but which will go absolutely ballistic at the slightest suggestion that abuse victims are themselves also capable of harm, that lashing out has the potential to hurt innocent people. In a perfectly executed DARVO, it becomes "victim blaming" to confront an abuse victim about the very real abuse they're inflicting on others. I only specified fictional characters here, but it's a dynamic you see in real life, too. Some people hunger for nothing so much as an acceptable target and abuse victims are not exempt from that statement.

The Dabi I thought was fun was the high-energy maniac who doesn't give a shit about anyone else getting caught in the crossfire of his revenge. Both that version of Dabi and the Endeavor who's paralyzed with guilt and despair are facilitated by Dabi’s father-obsession having a taboo sexual dimension to it that Dabi is all too ready to shove in the face of absolutely everyone who would think worse of Endeavor for it.  That means Endeavor himself, of course, but also all the good little civilians who Endeavor keeps telling to watch him.  Watch this, says Dabi, as he makes lewd hand gestures on force-streamed national television.

It's not about Dabi healing as an abuse victim, and it’s not about Dabi having a fulfilling arc—covering that stuff was canon's job!  It's about the fact that I, for reasons both personal and related to fandom spite, am personally entertained by Dabi being pedal-to-the-metal deranged about doing whatever it takes to seize Daddy’s attention and never let him look away again, which also means acting to ensure that no one is capable of or willing to save Endeavor from that fate. Like, if you want someone who would spend ten years plotting the most agonizing possible way to torment his abuser, then it’s sophistry to suddenly declare some agonizing torments off-limits.  Dabideavor is just committing to the bit.

[butch-bakugo]

Proshippers: omg why can't antis just leave us alone! 🙄 Don't like don't read! Cultivate your online experience!

Antis: ok. * Mass blocks you* *puts you on our DNIs * * Ignores you*

Proshippers: Wait no! I sustain myself on complaining about you! My identity is only based on how " weird" I am! You guys aren't even complaining about me making graphics harassing you guys telling you your assault was actually your fault! How can I complain about harassment and bullying when you guys don't harass or bully me! You won't even respond when I screenshot your posts and laugh at you? When I complain about the concepts of a dni because most exclude me?? Don't you get it! We're the real victims! Somehow your a puritan and a bigot and a Christian for not liking my art of two siblings fucking each other and drawing porn of an underage live action character using the likeness of the child actor who played them! Don't you understand?

I only exist as counter culture and you guys have to keep up our fight! If you disappear I'm just a sad weirdo! You can't just block me out and ignore me like I've been asking you to! Hello??? I only exist on twitter, Tumblr and Ao3 where my creepy rape mindset is normalized by other Nazis and Openly pedofil-i mean radqueers and paraphiles! If you guys let me fall into obscurity than how can I sustain myself! How will I exist in my mind as a cool nerd who fights censorship if you guys don't censor me and just let my art fail with zero engagement??

What do you mean I spend more time drawing porn of kids and defending my right to do so on the internet than actually getting the therapy I need to stop drawing sim cp period? What do you mean therapists in mass discourage fictional cp cause it often leads to offending and there's tons of documents and resources proving that available with a simple google search?? What do you mean my art isnt coping because its used to groom others and continue the cycle of violence because I make no attempt at hiding my art or content from children period but especially those in broken homes who assume its ok because my content aligns with their real abusive experiences?? What do you mean I became the villian and creep who caused me real harm and 32 year old women thirsting after teenage boys on the Internet are not the revered fandom elders i was told i should become? What do you mean I'm the type of fan no one likes and constantly has to bring up so other's know they arnt like me? What do you mean we've fostered a community that actively harms victims of abuse and children en masse and normalized it so much I'm completely tone deaf by sending traumatizing incest fanfiction to my friends? Arnt they the real abusers by not letting me retrumatize them over and over again and claim their silencing me because I cant send links to rape porn in their discord server??

What do you mean I can't compare my fetishization of sex crimes to fans of horror movies cause it's a false equivalency and only my contribution is condoning the violence by painting it as sexy and desirable and my tiny disclaimer at the bottom basically means nothing when everything else I say isnt aligned with it?? What do you mean I show my true colors when I'm faced with the reality the only people who benefit from my fictional cp are pedophiles?? What do you mean rape victims don't like it when I portray rape as some sexy coercion and I know I'm wrong simply by the fact I try to hide the real word for what I'm writing/drawling under inconspicuous shit I made up like non-con and dub-con??

I'm supposed to be the victim, not you!! I'm the real victim! Your a bully for ignoring me and blocking me! This is clearly harassment! You clearly hate gay people because you don't like my gay pedo incest art with no actual sensitivity and I exclusively made it to jerk off to and not catch a felony or address my own rotting morality by justifying my wank to child porn drawn in an anime art style because they are fictional and not real! I know I recently identified also as a paraphile and a ficto-zoonecrosomnopedo but not everyone who likes my realistic porn of animals and children also clearly have my mental illnesses that are going completely unchecked! I'm the victim in all this, don't you know! I'm the victim!!!

[sevensoulmates]

i don't see eddie getting his own queer arc i think for one it'd be repetitive. i think for eddie it's simply gonna be the realization that he's in love with his best friend. buck will be the experienced one of the two so it's not bling leading the blind.

I respectfully disagree. Personally, I don't think it'll be repetitive if Eddie gets his own queer realization arc, because both of them have two different experiences with queerness.

Technically diving into my own headcanon here, so fair warning but I personally (IN MY PERSONAL INDIVIDUAL SINGUALR OPINION (I hate to use disclaimers here but I'm not trying to get accused of biphobia here)) view Eddie as a repressed gay man. I don't believe he is truly attracted to women (at least romantically, sexually is another story but then I'd have to dive more into demisexuality which I don't plan to do here). Anyway.

Buck's experience with coming out would be as a man who has always been happily attracted to women and will find out that he is attracted to men IN ADDITION.

For Eddie, if he were to get a queer realization arc, I think it would be vastly different from Buck's because he wouldn't be realizing he likes men as well as women, he'd be finding out that not only does he like men, but he hasn't actually been in love/attracted to any of the women he was with in the past (and that includes Shannon, and NO I will NOT be elaborating on that). I think that this will end up triggering a whole huge overhaul of Eddie's view of himself, his entire life, his family, and his marriage, and I think it will bring him a lot of guilt. Eddie's not the kind of person just to be like oh guess that's why I never was into sex with Ana or Marisol whoopsies and move on. Man is gonna feel GUILTY. That's what he's programmed to feel in response to everything.

I was telling a friend that I bet you ANYTHING Eddie is gonna resist something with Buck out of some backward loyalty to Shannon. Like "No, I can't be gay. Because that means I was using Shannon." No honey you were not. You were just deeply deeply repressed and traumatized.

For me, an Eddie queer realization arc would be an entire deconstruction of every single thing he's ever believed himself to be. Which would be vastly different from Buck realizing he's bi. Buck's bisexual arc will likely come with its own bisexual-specific issues.

I also want to say that even if Eddie did come out as bisexual like Buck (and I would be 100% okay with that happening in the show) I think it's quite diminishing to say Buck AND Eddie both getting queer realization arcs would be "repetitive" because the fact of the matter is that every queer person has a different experience.

More than likely, if Eddie figures this out later than Buck, then yes, Buck will likely be the one most experienced. And I do agree that it's unlikely they'll have Eddie realize he's queer in the exact same way Buck does (ie jealousy over a 3rd guy, etc) but I do think there's a strong possibility of Eddie having his own queer arc. Maybe in season 7 in tandem with Buck, or maybe later in season 8.

Either way, I need people to get off this whole "stop rehashing past stories", "I hate characters making the same old mistakes" or "get off the hamster wheel" train. What I like about 911 is that despite the somewhat unrealistic disasters and calls, and somewhat over-the-top drama at times, the actual character journeys they tell are true to real things people go through. And in real life, people exist in cycles, and that's not always a bad thing.

[isabeljkim]

What the hell is going on with Day Ten Thousand:

Day Ten Thousand was weird enough that I felt like it deserved directors commentary, even though I’ve stopped explaining myself mostly except when I do.

Here’s a disclaimer before we begin: don’t read too much into it. I've noticed our culture wants to explain young womens’ art as some sort of public confessional booth and our current culture has a fetish for the autobiographical. Fuck that. I didn’t write three different POVs and three interlocking nonlinear narratives about the nature of storytelling as a psychic technology to be told that my writing isn’t a calculated Craft with a capital C. Now whether it is good Craft is a decision for you, not for me. 

Anyway. 

Day Ten Thousand is a satire of an Isabel story by way of Vonnegut pastiche. We’ll come back to this. 

I called Day Ten Thousand “psychoanalysis bait” on twitter so I shall put all my cards on the table so that your psychoanalysis is at least accurate. Note that these are only my cards, because other people deserve their privacy. I guess you could probably Google all of this but like, jeez. Don’t.

I had a pretty regular time in college except for the tangential deaths. 

When I was twenty, I was the opinion editor for my university newspaper and a girl who was a friend of a friend killed herself by walking in front of a subway. There was then a sort of a small suicide bubble which was a little bit public because we were an Ivy, and one of my opinion columnists was kinda suicidal, and I, without any training, ended up in charge of writing a front page editorial about the mental health crisis on campus on account of the dead kids, etc, and talk to administration about the dead kids. 

I hate talking about dead kids. Don’t ask me about it, or about the reporting. I don’t want to talk about it. 

The whole thing sucked shit and it’s why I’m a lawyer now and not a reporter. 

If this was a story that would be the only fact, but this is reality so I have to mention that a couple years later a guy I knew got literally hate crimed and murdered in a forest. I found out about that because I saw his friend crying in public and didn’t stop to ask what was wrong. Later I heard about this in the news, and realized my acquaintance had been Literally Fucking Murdered. A few months ago I had been arguing with him in the literary magazine editors meeting about whether a poem was good or not. I think he won that argument. Then he was murdered for being gay. 

These were my introductions to the specific emotion of “sometimes people die and you don’t feel like you get to feel bad about their deaths and you still think about it a couple times a month seven years later.” 

You can probably guess where the subject material of this story came from.

Day Ten Thousand was a story about inevitable deaths, and the difference between a death in a story and a death in reality, and about…the way a death marks a narrative and a real life and how it becomes fictionalized over time. I also saw a clean way to finally do my deep time / far future story, which was something I had been thinking about on and off for a couple of years (the original version was about a shaman in the deep-time era who has a vision about having to do a murder re: preserving genetic material for the future, but it never really gelled in a way that made sense). 

I had also been wanting to write something a little metafictional, because I felt like I was writing the same story over and over (if you’ve noticed my stuff getting weirder, that’s why. I was on a bit of an experimentalist kick late last year and early this year). 

So it’s a satire of an Isabel story. I’m self-aware enough to note my obvious recurring motifs: time travel, dead people, grief, people who have a weird relationship to each other, a third-act twist, the tendency to punctuate with in-universe facts to imply emotion, to tell x in order to show y, egregious and blatant use of the second person. And then there’s the stuff that you wouldn’t know, but I do: I dislike writing in the first person, I wanted to do something nonlinear, I think a lot about stories about stories, about the idea of a story as a technology, I find myself dropped into recursive fate-like thought patterns. So a lot of this story is both my self-deprecating poking fun at myself and my habits, and also my thesis statement about…what is the point of fiction if not to make sense of the past and the future, I suppose.

The reason it is a Vonnegut pastiche is because I like Vonnegut a lot and I was trying to do something Slaughterhouse-5-ish with drastically less fucked source material. Sorry Kurt. 

There are three stories happening in Day Ten Thousand, and a secret fourth story. Each story is a suicide loop. The protagonist is trying to break a specific loop by telling a story. This story is about accepting what you have to, and changing what you can. This is a story about letting go and also not letting go. The emotional range of each narrative affects the other psychically, because by changing the vibe of the metanarrative, the individual narratives are allowed to change. 

The story in the archaic is a story that is being told postmortem, it is all hypotheticals based on fact. The story in the future is a singular narrative happening in real time until it isn't. And the story in the present is a guy telling the story about the future, which requires him to tell the story about the past as well, and mostly what Dave is doing here is avoiding the question, but it reflects how Dave thinks about the girl dying in front of the train. 

Does that make sense? No? That’s fair. That’s a postmortem explanation of what actually happened. What actually happened is that I rewrote Day Ten Thousand six times, each time more frustrating than the last, each time with the neutral-ish narrator taking up more and more air. And over time the narrator became a participant, and that’s what created the secret fourth story between “you” and the narrator. 

I had thought there were only three loops that needed to be escaped - the past (archaic, pinned story), and the future (space station, mutable fact), and that the present (the narrator’s world) was something that was static (pinned fact). After all, the girl’s already dead. She’s already stepped in front of the train. 

But the narrator isn’t doing so hot. The narrator is also Dave. And the narrator is telling the story to someone. Somewhere between version one and version six, I realized the only version of this story that makes sense is the one where the story is a conversation, and that you and I, as the narrator and the person at the other end, were also in a loop. 

So. That's whats happening.

I’m not sure if I love the ending. But I rewrote it six times and this one felt as final as it is going to get. I am done reinventing the fucking wheel. You know how it is with spaghetti. Promise I’ll write you something normal next time, I think I’ve gotten the avant- garde out of my system for a few months. 

And hey, I know I said all cards on the table but people deserve their privacy and that includes the kid i used to be when I was twenty, sitting in the shitty little windowless opinion column office, writing about suicide. 

Anyway. Day Ten Thousand is about stuff and things. Themes. So it goes. 

Thanks for reading. I’ll see you later. 

If that was too depressing for you, here are some fun facts: 

The main character is Dave after 2001: A Space Odyssey because I had wanted to make a “I’m sorry Dave I can’t do that” joke, but I couldn’t shove it in :( 

I just thought that phlebotomist was a funny word but I also fucked myself because I misspelled it every time. 

I reread half of Slaughterhouse Five to write this but then my copy got returned to the library automatically so I didn’t finish it. (yes, I’ve read it before, like three times)  

I took one single evolutionary anthropology course in college and it shows.  

I did end up looking at the wikipedia page for “the wheel” for this and then wondering exactly what I was doing with my life. 

About half the facts in this are real, and I read a couple of papers for a couple of things in it (that I promptly then ignored), but the rockets-rome-horse’s ass thing is specifically a story that my friend Max H. likes to tell. 

[popchoc]

Grey's 21x06

And there we go.... After being anxious about Mika for the entire episode and for all the wrong reasons (I was mostly scared she was gonna screw up medically because of sleep deprivation, which could be the beginning of the end for her, getting fired and all), they waited for the last second with a simple, good old car crash. Which was rough. And should have shocked me endlessly.

But instead my first response was: there you go.

And I hate that. I hate to (kind of) know in advance, to see it coming. I don't want to know that actors are leaving. I want the classic "oh my god it's George... 007 is George!!" shock. And I want to have hope, to believe that they are gonna save her next week. That she still has a chance.

And yes, I know that it's not over just yet, but I also get that death is actually the only fitting way of writing Mika off, since she has no single reason to leave otherwise, with her kicking ass at the hospital and now really falling for Jules and all. Plus it does make for good drama (man, my heart already breaks when I think of Jules having to deal with this). But it's that knowledge and understanding that's ruining the ride. It's sad enough to lose the character (one of the best Grey's had in a long time!), but like this, it's too easy to lose hope, too.

Disclaimer: of course I could still be completely wrong... damn do I hope so. But even then I stand by not needing to know this kind of info in advance anymore. It just ruins part of it.

Regarding the episode itself, well thank god for those lingering looks/obvious build-up between the aforementioned lovebirds getting me through, cause the rest was mostly forgettable or annoying.

Pregnant Jo is even more urgh than normal Jo (please don't @ me about hormones or other pregnancy crap, I'm very aware that it's like 90% me being sick of these kind of stories in general). Also I'm all team Link here; he's clearly trying to be there for her since the start while she keeps bitching at him 24/7, and he does not deserve her distrust because of some assholes leaving her.

When it comes to jumping to conclusions though, Owen is the real winner. Jeez dude, overreacting much?! The whole situation was a literal joke (for now?)!! I also bet he hates the (in his mind) threat of a woman instead of a guy even more than the kiss/attention itself, since it bruises his tender manhood and all - god, he's such an ape). So yeah, another big URGH.

On another personal note: does everyone have to be queer in this show these days? And yes, I'm asking this as a queer! I know very well that there are more of us around than many people realize, but when they're starting to make it look like an invasion and even making me sigh about it, I'm not so sure anymore. (Also how can we complain about bury the gays when practically everyone is gay, so in a show like this they simply have to kill of a bunch?! 😜)

Anyway, this is getting way too long and I already forgot most of the rest anyway, so I'd better leave it with this. (Oh wait, I remember the helicopter drawing, that was kinda cute. Levi's talk with Helm was sweet too. Nonetheless I'm fine with him leaving. I do hope for him his bf will join him though, he deserves a happy exit.). Time to focus on next week... and to prepare for some actual drama...?

[wellhalesbells]

Okay, so, new shows I've picked this fall are English Teacher (which entirely has to do with it being a Brian Jordan Alvarez joint and The Gay and Wondrous Life of Caleb Gallo remains one of the best things ever. I love it so far and Markie steals every scene he's in) and High Potential (which I am literally only watching for Kaitlin Olson, though Judy Reyes was a lovely surprise! It's a not-so-great premise and it is another cop show [blech] but Kaitlin Olson is freaking wonderful in it and it is a popcorn show so..... either it'll really click and it'll be on forever or it won't and it'll die in its first season. We shall see. Every time I try to make a prediction on which procedural show will last, I am always wrong lol).

Other ones I'm planning to check out are How to Die Alone (I have never seen Natasha Rothwell in something - Insecure or Love, Simon - and not thought: more, MORE so I really need to get to this one. Especially since she's not just the star but also the creator), Murder in a Small Town (I completely get why true crime podcasts/shows would be so bingeable but I also can't help but feel gross indulging in them so fictional ones should be perfect for me. Like, I really like books that have true crime podcasts in them so this show will hopefully scratch that itch, right? Not to say that this has a true crime podcast in it but that should be the vibe, yeah? And I'm willing to get further away from it because Bodkin was honestly such a disappointment for me), Penelope (Mark Duplass is pretty much the whole draw here, I like the stuff he does but the description is so bleh so I keep forgetting about it) and Grotesquerie (honestly this is because I always try to get in on a Ryan Murphy show on the ground floor because almost every time I find them, there are 80,000 episodes and everyone is telling you it's shit anyway, lol. I also have no problem dropping his shows if they're terrible - I don't even think I made it out of the first season of Glee and I know I only got as far as I did because of Jane Lynch. Plus, Niecey Nash! I follow my Reno 911! people around, I can't help myself). I am completely on the fence about A Very Royal Scandal (as mentioned, I don't like rooting around through real people's trauma and the only draw to this is Michael Sheen). Oh and maybe Twilight of the Gods (I want someone else to watch this and tell me if it's at all worthwhile or if it's too bro-y for words because sometimes.... *coughs*).

Ones that aren't out yet but that I'm definitely gonna poke at: Teacup (a James Wan horror show? Yes, please!), Disclaimer (this sounds bonkers and Cate Blanchett and Kevin Kline? Okay fine, I'm in.), St. Denis Medical (some of my favorite comic actors and I like Abbott Elementary, okay, so if people keep wanting to apply that formula elsewhere? I'm for it!), Interior Chinatown (sounds like it could be cool as hell), The Franchise (if we have to keep doing superheores, at least we're switching up the premise for them), Sweetpea (there's just nothing about this that doesn't appeal to me, lol), maybe The Pradeeps of Pittsburgh (I liked Fresh Off the Boat a lot, the problem is all the descriptions make it sound like it's just that show but with an Indian family now and I don't know if I liked it enough to watch it again, y'know?), A Man on the Inside (Mike Schur, Ted Danson, Stephanie Beatriz? You couldn't keep me away from this if you tried), and The Madness (it's all for Colman Domingo, act surprised). Maybe Poppa's House (I love Damon Wayans, Jr., but I have a massive hate hard-on for CBS shows, they feel so soulless to me and everything contributes to that. The laugh tracks, the lighting, the acting, etc.).

So this is partly for me to keep track of shows that I want to watch/aren't out yet and partly because I have an ad blocker, I don't watch anything that can give me commercials, and this is the only social media I'm on so if you've heard of something that sounds cool (or you've checked out one of the ones on my list and are like: well you could watch that or just stab a pencil in your eye instead...) let me know!

[eva-knits12]

The Hate and Death Threats Are Uncalled For

Trigger warning: Mentions of suicide. If you are feeling suicidal, please dial 988 or 911 immediately!

DISCLAIMER: If you believe that Chris Evan's "marriage" is PR, then fine. I know it's PR, it's fake, there's a contract involved. If you believe it's real, then fine. I have nothing against you if you believe it's real. I disagree. I think we can find some common ground here.

PR contracts aren't a new thing in Hollywood. They've been around since the beginning of Hollywood, and they'll keep coming out with PR contracts. PR contracts were a way to cover up a star's sexual orientation, which is where fake marriages come into play here. They were legal up until 1965. Liberace was gay. So was Rock Hudson. Katherine Hepburn was a closeted lesbian. All of them were in PR marriages, and under PR contracts. So, this isn't the first time we've had a PR contract, and it's not going to be the last PR contract. They'll still exist even after Chris and the porn troll break up.

A few bloggers on here have been getting hate asks, and death threats. I refuse to name this person, and I refuse to give her the space on my blog. She doesn't deserve the space on my blog, and she doesn't deserve to live in my head rent-free.

There are bloggers wishing death upon Chris. Wishing that he'd drown, kill himself, etc. That's uncalled for! If I didn't like Chris, I wouldn't wish death upon him. That speaks volumes about your character.

These same bloggers have sent hate asks to several people, and have even accused certain bloggers of switching sides. I'm #Team Chris. I haven't changed my stance that this is PR. I was team PR until all of this hate, all of these DM's and all of the bullying started to intensify. Like I said, if you believe that this marriage is real, then fine. As I have stated before, I disagree. I'm still adult enough to let you have your beliefs, and guess what? That's okay! All I want is for Chris to be happy.

Chris looks miserable right now. There's no life in his soul, no life or light in his eyes, he's lost so much weight due to stress. There is little holding him together at this point. This is beyond guilt. He's in this contract, and it's deeper than we think.

This PR stunt will end when it's supposed to end. Chris and the porn troll will break up at some point, and it's not up to us to put out articles because it's not going on OUR timeline. Only two people know when this will end.

Telling someone to off themselves, wish they'd unalive themselves, and even making death threats is uncalled for. There are kids that have committed suicide because they were told to off themselves. There are people sitting in jail on murder charges because they have told a person to do this. You can be arrested for this!

The police can build a case easily because posts on IG, tumblr, facebook, e-mails and texts are time stamped. So, it doesn't take a detective to build a case.

I have lost two people in my life to suicide, and it never gets any easier.

All this hate right now is just uncalled for. I don't care what side you're on, I think both team PR and team real are unhinged. Both sides keep attacking each other over their own personal beliefs, and when someone walks away, or even interacts with someone from the other side, we're accused of switching sides. If you switch sides, fine. I have nothing against you if you do.

I'm Team Chris. There's still good in the man, and we just want to see him happy. He is still a decent human being underneath all this.

"Be excellent to each other."-Bill and Ted

Thanks for coming to my TED talk.

[loveless-arobee]

On Queerplatonic Relationships and Amatonormativity

Or: some thoughts on QPRs and why I think that word should be taken away from some of you. Or: Why I can't with some parts of the online aromantic community. (Only some! Most of you are great.)

Disclaimer: If you use QPR to describe any of your relationships, this is not an attack on you, personally. I don't have anything against the concept of QPRs, nor against anyone who has this kind of relationship. If you are in a QPR or want one, all power to you!

These are also mostly just my rambly thoughts and not an insult or attack to anyone personally. It is, however, totally an attack on amatonormativity. But mostly just ranting. Have fun.

Great wall of text incoming. I have a lot of thoughts currently.

First, let's get our definition down: The "queer" in queerplatonic, or queer-platonic does not mean the same as "queer" for people in the LGBT+ community. It has the same root, the word for weird or outside of social norms, but it does not refer to the LGBT+ community. Another word for it is quasi-platonic, but queer-platonic is more widely known. As the root of the name implies, there is no real definition! Anything that is "weird for a platonic relationship", so to say, might be queerplatonic! Anything that falls outside the social norms for a friendship; which means what it means also changes based on the society around you! Yes, that can be a lot.

This means anyone can have a QPR; gay, straight, lesbian, bi, aro, allo, or ace. Anyone. An allo lesbian could be in a QPR with an allo gay man. Two straight guys could be in a QPR. A FWB-arrangement/sexual friendship could be called QPR. Hell, even a straight woman and a straight man can call their relationship a QPR.

Now that we know what a QPR is, I also want to make clear what QPRs are not!

QPRs are not deeper than "just" friendship. They are not somewhere between romantic relationships and friendship ( as in, "in the hierarchy of relationships", I'll get to that.) They are not "relationships, but for aros".

Now, the definition of amatonormativity for anyone who is new here: Amatonormativity is the assumption that all human beings pursue love or romance, especially by means of a monogamous long-term relationship; this is the shortest possible explanation, but it’ll be enough for now.

I want to start with the societal hierarchy of relationships. And that always starts with my hatred of the phrase "just friends"!

I absolutely hate this phrase. I despise it. In both directions: There is "People who are just friends wouldn't do that" (kiss or cuddle for example), or the opposite "They are just friends" (presumably because they don't do "that"). Or "they are more than friends".

Society has put relationships in a hierarchy: simplified, friends are at the bottom, family above them, and at the very top is the monogamous, romantic partner for whom you're supposed to put the first two behind. That is mostly known by people who started to look into amatonormativity.

Now, there are some people who think it is "dismanteling amatonormativity" to simply put another box into the pyramid, squish it in between friends and romantic partner, and label it "queerplatonic relationships", and that's it. They still say this type of relationship is "more than friendship".

But friends are not less than romantic or queerplatonic partners (or family, for that matter); and honestly whenever I hear the phrase "just friends", I assume the person who used it is just a horrible friend who does not at all care for their friends, and always puts them behind their romantic partner(s). Because this phrase does insinuate that friendship is worth less than other types of relationships.

To dismantle amatonormativity, we have to dismantle the idea that friends are "lesser than". And we have to dethrone romantic relationships. Not just add another layer to it.

But now, exept for the people who do what I stated above, what elso do queerplatonic relationships have to do with amatonormativity? Glad you asked!

I see a lot of aros taking the word "queerplatonic" and never deconstructing their own, internalized amatonormativity further. They'll say exactly the same things alloros say, just swaping (romantic) relationship/partner/lover for queerplatonic relationship/partner. I know people are in different stages of finding themselves and understanding amatonormativity, but it tires me out listening to them doing the exact same things that also harm them.

An example of this is aromantic people crying about how much they want a QPR, where to find a QPP, that they are so lonely and need a partner. I'm sorry to be so blunt, but do you not have any friends?

I know they do this because they want the closeness and love society has promised they'd find in a romantic relationship. But now that they've noticed they don't actually want this, they took the "next best thing" and ran with it.

But that is just amatonormativity. It should be questioned further. Why do you want a QPR so badly? Why is "just friends" not enough for you? What can you get out of a relationship that you couldn't also get from friends? What kind of assumptions are you making here?

Relationships, both queerplatonic and romantic, are not the be-all end-all of life. If you cannot be happy single, you will not be happy in a commited relationship of any kind. Sorry to say it so bluntly, but you really can't put your only source of happiness on one person. That is the whole essence of amatonormativity.

You know what the solution is? Find friends! Online or in real life, any maybe you'll find a QPR in there, too. You're not alone, and no matter what amatonormativity tells you, you don't need to be in a commited relationship of any kind to be deserving of whatever it is you want from a QPP! Be that love, intimacy, sex, commitment, a roommate, someone who'll raise a child with you or whatever. Because whatever you can get out of a romantic relationship or a queerplatonic relationship, you also can get out of friendship! Surprise! There are no borders between any of those. It's all just human connection, and whatever word you put on it, only the people inside the relationship can decide what their relationship entails, and what it doesn't!

Yes, that means two friends can totally raise a child together. They can even make that child together! There are no rules. Friends can marry, fuck, buy a house together, be committed to each other and share important life decisions. Romantic/queerplatonic partners could do any of those things, or nothing of it. All this is part of dismantling amatonormativity. Getting rid of all those borders and societal norms, stopping to police what people can or can’t do in what kind of relationships.

That was already a lot, but I'm not done yet.

Another thing I noticed in a-spec spaces is, well, the almost-forcing the QPR on other a-spec people. Not everyone wants a QPR, not every aromantic person is even partnering. I, for example, am completely non-partnering. This includes both romantic relationships and QPRs, and whatever other type of commited relationship you can think of. I only do friendship (and not even that really, but that's my extreme introversion, and has nothing to do with this text.)

There are more people like me out there. Acting like every aromantic person wants a QPR is actively erasing us from the aro-community, and in the end no different than alloros acting like every person should want a romantic relationship, and that aromantics are mentally ill for not wanting that. Y'all are doing the same thing just with different words.

It just feels very alienating, especially coming from my own community. Even more so when it’s happening in the same posts that also point out how bad amatonormativity is for everyone.

Idk, I just wish that would stop and people would just listen to more perspectives outside of their own.

Anyways, have a nice day. I’m done for now.

[multifandomkpop3]

Chapter One

Warnings: Mentions of abuse, mentions of alcohol abuse, child abandonment, mentions of child abuse and neglect, gay relationships, cursing, drinking a little, injuries, parenting, yelling, chaos (If there is more please let me know)

Series Preview: Seventeen received a notification of activity outside their home's gate, prompting them to investigate. Venturing out, they discovered a baby nestled in blankets within a car seat, abandoned without a soul in sight. A note attached to the infant's legs hinted at a story untold, leaving Seventeen to ponder the mysterious circumstances surrounding this unexpected arrival.

Author’s note: We’re going to ignore how if this was to occur in real life it would not pan out like this and people would go to jail!!

Link For Taglist

*Disclaimer* This series will skip things and rearrange them so they correlate with the story more. I do not own Seventeen or anything with them all I own is Na-Ri and her storyline in this story. Be mindful this is fiction ONLY, which means do not take anything seriously or spread hate. No smut Na-Ri is 2. Most you’ll get is a kiss from the ships between the members. I love a block or report button btw!!

Next Part

As Na-Ri’s father stepped into the house after a long day’s work, he was greeted by a tumult of angry shouts, muffled cries, and labored breathing. Racing through the hallway, his heart pounding with dread, he followed the sounds, his mind racing to comprehend the chaos within. With a surge of fear and urgency, he flung it open, only to be met with a harrowing sight: his little girl, lying on the bed, while her mother stood over her, a pillow pressed tightly against Na-Ri’s head, pleading for silence.

He can hear Na-Ri struggling to breathe due to the crying and lack of air from the pillow. The scene froze him in horror, but instinct propelled him into action. He tore Na-Ri from her mother’s grasp, hurling her away from their daughter, the pillow clattering to the ground.

Once the air starts reaching her lunges again Na-Ri can’t do anything but cry harder, vision blurry and chest moving rapidly up and down. “D-Daddy h-help” Na-Ri’s sweet precious voice squeezes out the little sentence she knew in this moment looking for any salvation.

“I’m here babygirl, I promise” Na-Ri father picks her up pulling her to his chest.

“Why would you do this?” he cried, his voice thick with anguish, as tears welled in his eyes. “She’s just a child, our child!”

But his wife’s response was chillingly callous. “She wouldn’t stop,” she spat, her voice laced with bitterness. “I asked her to be quiet, but she just wouldn’t listen. She’s being dramatic! I’m your wife! Fuck her!” Her mother leaped over to the man trying to force the still crying little girl out of his arms. “She doesn’t need to be babied! Put her down and let her figure it out!” He pulls back away from his wife keeping his baby in his arms and backing up out of the room.

“What has happened to you! I don’t know you anymore!” His tears finally fall as he looks at the stranger in front of him. “Oh, shut up you’re just as weak as your daughter!” The woman yells in his direction as she tries to grab the baby again.

Realizing there was no reasoning with her. As she lunged for Na-Ri, demanding to be obeyed, he knew he had to act. Scooping his daughter into his arms, he retreated, his mind reeling with shock and sorrow.

Without saying another word her father gets out of the front door with his crying daughter and runs to the car putting Na-Ri in her car seat and ignoring the women still drunkenly yelling at the two. Unsure of where to go, he drove off, driven by the primal instinct to shield his daughter from harm, praying for a sanctuary far from the madness they had left behind.

They drive for around an hour as her father thinks about what his next move will be. Na-Ri has fallen asleep in the backseat, every now and then her father takes a glimpse of her making sure she’s still off in her dreamland.

While driving Na-Ri’s father passes this gated community full of big expensive houses, imagining a life for him and his family, a desperate idea took root in his mind. It was a plan born of desperation, one he couldn't bring himself to acknowledge as noble, but he knew it was the only way to ensure Na-Ri's safety while still supporting his wife.

Pulling over, he retrieved paper and pen from the glove compartment, hastily scribbling a note and placing it by Na-Ri's sleeping form. With a heavy heart, he carried her car seat to the gate, her blissful ignorance of the moment piercing his resolve.

Na-Ri has been a hard sleeper all her life, never waking up until she was fully ready so he knew he could do this without waking her up.

Her father rings a random house labeled 1331 on the call box, as it rings he gives his daughter a kiss on the forehead and bids he a goodbye before placing her in front of the call box. With tears streaming down his cheeks, he fled back to his car, unable to witness the aftermath of his decision.

He never saw himself losing his daughter this way but he also never saw his reality shifting the way it did when his father in law died causing his wife to spiral out of control. If losing his poor child meant protecting her, he will have to live that grief and sorrow he brought himself.

Starting the engine, he stole a final glance, seeing two figures emerge from the gate. As he drove away, the weight of uncertainty settled upon him, the knowledge of the story he was leaving behind for his daughter to unravel in the years to come.

It was around 3 in the afternoon when all 13 members of the famous K-pop band Seventeen returned home after their busy schedule. Half of them were showering, while the others were in the kitchen and living room, preparing dinner. S. Coups, Jeonghan, and Woozi were in the kitchen, bustling about as they worked on La gabi and tteokbokki. They chatted about their day and their plans for tomorrow, their conversation abruptly interrupted by the sound of the alarm system alerting them to someone at the neighborhood gate.

S. Coups, the leader, decided to investigate. He made his way to the screen that displayed a live image of their gate, only to see a car seat turned away from the camera. Concerned, he called Mingyu and Wonwoo to join him in checking it out.

As they stepped out of the house, they remained vigilant, ensuring there were no saesangs using the car seat as a ploy to lure them out. Once they confirmed there was no one else around, they approached the gate and opened it.

"Hyung, I think that's a baby," Mingyu said, glancing at the other two dark-haired men.

"Come on, Mingyu. Who would just leave a baby somewhere?" Wonwoo replied, his expression skeptical.

"No, he's right. That is a baby," S. Coups said, stepping closer to the seat to confirm Mingyu's statement.

"Okay, but why?" Wonwoo bent down next to S. Coups, Mingyu joining them as they all peered at the sleeping child.

"We should take her inside. It's hot out here," Mingyu suggested, reaching to pick up the car seat.

"I don't know, we could get in trouble," S. Coups cautioned, looking between Mingyu and Wonwoo.

"I don't think so, hyung. There's no one else around here. She's alone," Wonwoo said, backing up Mingyu's suggestion.

They carefully lifted the car seat, and the baby stirred slightly but did not wake. As they carried her inside, their bandmates gathered around, their faces a mix of curiosity and concern.

"What’s going on?" Jeonghan asked, his eyes widening at the sight of the car seat.

"We found a baby at the gate," S. Coups explained, placing the seat gently on the living room floor.

"A baby? Are you serious?" Joshua exclaimed, peering over Jeonghan's shoulder.

"Yeah, and she’s alone. We didn’t see anyone else around," Mingyu added, looking at the tiny, sleeping face.

"Well, we can’t just leave her out there," Woozi said, crouching down to get a better look. "Does anyone know what to do with a baby?"

Seungkwan, always practical, suggested, "We should call the authorities. Maybe they can help us figure out what to do next."

"Good idea," S. Coups agreed, already reaching for his phone. "But in the meantime, we need to make sure she’s comfortable. Mingyu, can you grab a blanket? And Jeonghan, could you find something soft for her to lie on?"

As they worked together to care for the unexpected guest, the members of Seventeen couldn’t help but feel a protective instinct kicking in. They had no idea why she was left at their gate, but one thing was certain: they would do everything they could to keep her safe until they figured out the next steps.

Mingyu returned with a soft blanket, and Jeonghan found a plush cushion to lay the baby on. As they carefully lifted her from the car seat, they noticed a folded note tucked into the padding. S. Coups unfolded it and began to read aloud:

"This is Na-Ri. She is 2 years old and very friendly and precious. I am her father. I will not be telling you my name because I do not want you to try to return her to me or her mother. She was in a very dangerous home and the only way I saw to protect her was to give her up. Please take care of her because she deserves the world and more. Don’t allow her to look for me or her mother when she gets older. Just tell her that her mother was sick and her father cared about her and her mother very much and had to make a grave sacrifice. Tell her I love her."

The room fell silent as they absorbed the gravity of the message.

"Wow," Joshua whispered. "This is heavy."

"Yeah," S. Coups agreed, folding the note carefully and placing it back in the car seat. "We need to do right by her."

"Agreed," Woozi said softly, looking at Na-Ri’s peaceful face. "We’ll take care of her."

"Let’s get her settled and then call the authorities," S. Coups decided. "We’ll figure this out together."

They set up a cozy spot for Na-Ri in the living room, laying her on the plush cushion and covering her with the blanket. Seungkwan called the authorities, explaining the situation and the note they found.

A short while later, an officer arrived to speak with them. After hearing the full story, he nodded thoughtfully. "It's clear that Na-Ri's safety was at risk, and her father took desperate measures to ensure she was protected. Given the circumstances and the note, it seems the best course of action would be for you to keep her here for now. We can start the legal process for adoption, but it will take some time."

"Adopt her?" Jeonghan asked, surprise evident in his voice.

"Yes," the officer confirmed. "Given that you found her and she was left in your care, you have the right to apply for guardianship and eventually adoption, if that's something you're willing to do."

The members exchanged glances, the weight of the responsibility settling in.

"Are we ready for this?" Vernon asked, breaking the silence.

"We can do it," DK said firmly. "We have each other, and we can give her the love and support she needs."

S. Coups nodded, determination in his eyes. "Alright, we'll do it. We'll go through the process and make sure Na-Ri has a safe, loving home with us."

The officer smiled, reassured by their commitment. "I'll help you get started on the paperwork. In the meantime, make sure Na-Ri feels safe and cared for. She's lucky to have found her way to you."

As the officer left, the members of Seventeen gathered around Na-Ri, their resolve strengthened. They had a new mission now: to protect and raise this little girl as one of their own, giving her the world and more, just as her father had wished.

[spicybylerpolls]

I was there in the trenches of the sanitize byler phases of this tag. Literally a year ago the same discourse happened so the cycle repeats itself once a season. We just made it to kissing practice/makeout fics being acceptable when bylers were in-fighting about the morality of that. In every other fandom, there's an understanding that if you don't like keep scrolling. Don't engage, just block and find what you want to look at online without bothering others. But this overpolicing of how others run their blog is insane. The entitlement is rampant especially when the internet has always been the Wild Wild West aka never knowing what you'll stumble across so tread carefully and leave folks who aint send for you alone.

Not to mention that this misplaced outrage is over fictional characters when irl predators exist harming real people. If one consumes horror fic are they condoning murder? No, they're just a horror fan. So why is it not treated the same with erotica/smut fics. I have actual irls who are survivors of real predators who hate people misusing/overusing the predator terms over fictional characters on this site. They sometimes use fanfiction to process what happened to them as a kid/teen so their fic recs are pretty mature and dark due to the themes that help them feel seen/heard because it's easier to use fiction to understand their trauma at a safe distance than to talk to real people if they want to remain anonymous since that's very personal.

Are they freaks/weirdos/etc for wanting to read or engage in that stuff that harms literally no one? I promise real predators aren't on tumblr gushing about a fictional ship's sex lives. They're online somewhere trying to talk to actual kids who are unmonitored on the internet which a majority of adults know how to navigate better and have more access to since the internet was born in 1996.

To conclude, fight for irl survivors and prevent irl predatory behavior over fictional byler who would be in their mid50s by now. Also, newsflash, teens have sex, straight or gay, especially in the midwest when in a small ass town, especially the bigoted ones like Hawkins.

So sorry your blog is getting talked about when you gave a disclaimer, block button is free, and you let people know what tags to block as well. You're being nice cuz you didn't have to do all that, but you did, but nothing is ever gonna be good enough for byler tag. They must hate Young Royals with all the gay teen sex over there lol

All great points! And thank you for the support. And you're right. Antis must really not know what to do with Young Royals lol. The fact that some Bylers have been cancelled from writing makeout fics that are too steamy is still baffling to me.

[emilymaxximoff]

Deserve Better; Enid X Fem!Reader

CW: Some angst, Struggling with your sexuality, Fluff

Description: After Ron and Enid break up, you let Enid know that she has better options than him.

A/N: Confession time (sorry this note is gonna be long), I've been siting on this one for a hot sec. The absolute bi panic I feel between Carl and Enid is absurd. There's not a ton of Enid fics that I could find so I took it upon myself to write one of my own. This is definitely inspired by Boyfriend by Dove Cameron because, gay. I have been super excited bout this one. I definitely want to write more about her too. I mean just look at the GIF. Also the panic of do I want to be her or be with her is so real with her. Once agin disclaimer, everyone is at least 18. I am 19 and anything else creeps me out. The actors themselves are more than old enough now so like just please. It would mean so much to me if y'all reposted but don't feel like you have to. Love you!

-----

"Hey Y/N!" You heard someone yell behind you. You turned around and immediately smiled. It was Enid. You felt butterflies in your stomach as she lightly jogged towards you with a wicker laundry basket. She had a beautiful glow about her and her hair gently fell around her face.

"Hey Enid." you said as you gave her a cheesy grin. God she was beautiful. You had had a crush on her for years but you would never admit it. It was the apocalypse but people were still people and you were worried about if people would judge you. You also had no idea if Enid liked girls and she had just broken up with Ron so it seem a worse time as any to suddenly admit your feelings. Thankfully the break up didn't seem to bother her much. The only person who knew about your crush was Carl. That fucker knew everything about you. He knew before you did. He could read you like a comic book.

"So, I've been thinking and I think we need to have a girls night tonight. I've got shit to talk about." she said as she smiled back at you.

"Oh dear."

"Oh yes. Meet you at my house around sunset?"

You bit your lip and gave her a joking half grin. "Yeah, yeah. I'll see you then. I have guard duty tomorrow night though so we have to get some sleep tonight." you laughed.

"Great!" she squealed. "I'll see you later."

Your heart was beating out of your chest. You had sleepovers often but every time you still got butterflies. You always had to suppress the urge to lean over and kiss her and tell her how you felt but that never happened and you told yourself it never would. She made you so happy and she had no idea how much she meant to you and how much you loved those nights where it was just you two. She didn't know how much you wanted to hold her hand and hold her as you fell asleep. She had no idea how weak your knees felt as she let you wear her shirt and you breathed in the smell.

You started off towards the Grimes house to talk to Carl. He understood and you needed the support right now. You didn't even need to have the words for him to understand. You walked in the door and casually greeted Rick before climbing up the stairs and going into Carl's room.

"Hey shithead." you said throwing off your shoes and flopping down on his bed next to him.

"Well hello to you too." he laughed. "What's up?"

"I don't know my heart is just about to come out my ribcage and kill me but besides that I'm doing just peachy." you replied as dramatically as you could, sighing and putting the back of your hand on your forehead.

"Enid again?" he laughed at your dramatics, raising his eyebrow.

"Wow how'd you guess?" you rolled your eyes. "We're having a girls night again and you know how I feel during those. She's just so perfect god damn it."

"You should just tell her already. It's driving you insane and she broke up with Ron so it's a great time."

"YoU SHoUlD JuSt telL hEr." you mocked. "Yeah that will work out fucking great. I don't even know if she likes girls. I don't want to ruin our friendship."

"Jesus ok. You don't gotta be a bitch about it. I was just saying I hate to see you dancing around it like a pussy." he grinned at you.

You grabbed a pillow and threw it at him. You laughed as he put his hands up and laughed back. "Fuck you."

"Hey don't shoot he messenger just cause he's right."

-----

You took a breath as you knocked on the door of the Rhee house. Maggie opened the door and smiled at you. "Hey Y/N she's in her room. Let me know if you want snacks or anything. I don't have anything to do tonight." she said motioning you inside.

"Thanks Maggie. I'm good for now thanks." you said as you quickly rushed up the stairs towards Enid's room. You knocked lightly on the door and smiled waiting for the go ahead to come in.

"Come in." You saw her slime as you open then door and come in. "Y/N omg. Come here. I've got just so much shit to say."

You giggled and sat next to her on the soft bed. "Ok spill." you said crossing your legs and turning to look at her.

Oh did she have lots to say. She talked about her runs and her guard duties. She told you about the walkers she killed and how Maggie was nagging her about learning more combat. She ranted about Lydia and how annoying she was. You listened to every word she had to say, putting in input where appropriate. Everything was perfect. Just you two talking and sharing experiences. That was until Ron came up.

"Ron is trying to get back together with me again." you rolled your eyes. "Hey I know we just broke up but still. It's like how much else is there in the world at this point."

"I mean there is a lot more. I'm just saying you can do so much better. You deserve better. Ron is probably one of the worst options right now. He's mean to you a lot of the time." you replied, nervously playing with your hands.

"Yeah ok sure. Who then? Carl? Fuck no." she laughed sarcastically.

"No. As his friend I can tell you no. I'm saying there are other options." you paused. "Better options."

"Ok fine then tell me. What other person could I be with that's better?"

"A lot of people. Ron is awful." you said, trying so hard not to blurt out yourself.

"Ok but like who? We are some of the last people alive on this shithole." she said eying you. She could tell you had something on your mind.

You took a deep breath. You were frustrated and in the heat of the moment somehow you had courage. "I mean like me."

"What?" Enid stared at you wide eyed.

"Fuck. Just forget it. I'm sorry I didn't mean to." you sighed tears filling your eyes. You had been so mad at her naivety and you could stand it do you had blurted out your feelings. You felt as if you just wanted to melt away. Had you ruined your friendship? Was she mad? You couldn't look up at her. You were mortified.

"Hold up no. We need to talk about it. What did you mean?" Enid said reaching out to touch your shoulder. As she did you moved back, rejecting her touch and the tears you were holding back fell down your cheeks as you lifted your head to look at her emphatic face.

"NO! Fuck please stop. I didn't mean- I never meant to- just please lets move on or I'll just leave." You said shakily. You were trying to keep your composure but it was fading quickly.

"No. Y/N, I want to talk about this. I don't want to upset you but when someone you have known forever tells you that you could be good for them..... You want to know what they mean, ya know" Enid said as nicely as possible. You tried to read her face but it was impossible to in your distraught state.

"Fine. Do you honestly want the truth?" Enid nodded her head. "Honestly I've had feelings for you for a long time but you were with Ron and there are so many other factors like I don't know if you even like girls. I don't want you to hate me or think I'm creeping on you cause we sleep in the same bed all the time. It's not like that. I like you for more. Don't get me wrong I definitely wan to have sex but like it's more than that. I like your smile and personality and just everything you do. I mean again like I try not to let anyone know that I like girls so Carl is literally the only one who knows about my crush on you and also like I don't know if you like me or just girls cause you've never said anything. So I've been suppressing these feelings and I wasn't gonna say shit until... ya know... now."

You took a breath and looked at Enid for any validation. She smiled back at you in return. Your tears started to dry. "So what you're trying say is I should ditch men?" she smirked.

"I'm saying that I could be a better boyfriend than Ron ever could be." you said, leaning closer to her.

"Maybe I don't want a boyfriend anymore. Maybe I'm in the mood for a girlfriend now." Enid leaned close to you too, closing more space so you could feel her breath on your lips. You felt butterflies in your stomach and you couldn't contain the huge cheesy grin.

"Well I can be a better girlfriend than Ron too." Enid closed the gap, connecting your lips. she grabbed your face and pulled you even closer. You felt so happy and even through you were kissing her you just wanted to be closer, to become one being. You grabbed her hips and pulled the rest of her close to you. Even though it pained you, you separated once you were out of breath.

"As much as I want to keep going, I told you, I'm gonna be a better partner than you have ever had before. That means doing this the right way. Let me take you out on a date, a real one." you smiled.

Enid groaned and smiled. "I'm ok with rushing in."

"I know but still. I want this to last. I'm gonna do it by the book."

"Ok, I understand. Can we at least hold each other tonight?"

"Anything for you beautiful."

As you snuggled into Enid, you felt at peace for the first time in a long time. To know the girl you loved, loved you back. To know that at least one person could love you for who you were. For now, that's all that mattered.