#don’t come for me about the watermark I spent a long time running these through ae and topaz

[eywaseclipse]

Raw, next question

[fangirlinsweden]

Never Mess with Voodoo Part 2

Pairing: Steve Rogers x reader

Warnings: Voodoo, magical things, money problems, angst                        

Word Count:                                                                    

Square Filled: Fairytale AU for @star-spangled-bingo        

Summary:  Prince Steven visits New Orleans and gets tangled with a Voodoo Curse and running for his life. Y/N gets messed up in his curse and together they try to find a way to break the course and free their new friends they made during the journey.

A/N: New series for the @star-spangled-bingo. I think it will be about 5 parts. It is based on the Disney movie The Princess and the frog. But it is my twist of things.

Also today it’s been a year since Stan Lee past away and I wrote this series him in mind. So I have written him into the story, as a cameo.

I would like to thank @allaboutthebooz​ for her support and motivation. And I would also like to thank @kaunis-sielu​ and @banditthewriter​ for there insight in how they write and deal with things. If you have not read any of there work, you really should check it out!!

You had spent the last couple of days baking a thousand Beignets and now you feel exhausted, but you had promised Virginia to be at her masquerade and you kept your promises. Virginia had been so giddy when you met her the other day and so sure that Prince Steven would fall madly in love with her. You were not so sure. Not that Virginia was not lovely, but did love at first sight really happen? Maybe Prince Steven would become Virginia's husband in the future or her friend might make an ass out of herself as she goes after her dreams at becoming a real princess. You hoped for the first and if you could you would try and make sure that the last one did not happen. Your costume was one of a simple farm girl because it was a costume you found in your closet. No need to spend money on a new costume. The money needed to go to your dream and nothing else. You knew Virginia would not be happy with your costume, but that she would get over it.   

You packed everything together and walked out to the car that Virginia's father, Robert, had sent to pick you up. Robert was a sweetheart and you knew that he was worried about you living in your neighbourhood, but you had refused to accept his help at living somewhere else. You needed to take care of yourself. It was a thing about pride for you. He had even offered you move in with him and Virginia at the mansion, but it was too far to your jobs from there. You greeted the driver and he helped you put everything in the car and then you were off to the party. 

  When you arrived at the mansion the preparations for the party was in full swing. Virginia was walking around all the servers in a beautiful pale pink ball gown and she had a tiara on her head that glistered in the light. It didn't surprise you that she was dressed as a princess.  “Oh, Y/N,” Virginia said as she hurried over to you. “I am so glad that you are here.” She gave you a big hug.  “Where else would I be,” You hugged her back.  “I am just so nervous,” she admits and drags you towards the snack table where servers are plating your Beignets.  “You have nothing to be nervous about,” You say and squeeze her hand. “You look beautiful, the part looks fantastic and you are going to meet a prince. What more can you ask for?” Virginia looks away and it sounded like she sobbed.  “What is wrong?” you ask and she turns around. You can see the tears in her eyes.  “I need to tell you something…” Virginia starts saying when her father comes over and interrupts. Virginia looks away from her father and blinks away her tears.  “Y/N, you came,” He laughs and pulls you into a hug.  “Hey, there Robert,” you laugh. “Or should I call you King Robert?” He laughs and realises you from his arms. “I am not the King until tomorrow,” Robert winks at you. “Then I will just wait until tomorrow,” You smile at him. Virginia is quiet, just standing there which was not like her.  “Still nervous, my dear?” Robert asks his daughter. She smiles at her father and shakes her head.  “Not now that Y/N is here,” she answers and lay her arm around your shoulders. “Although I wish she would have a more eye-catching costume on.”  “You know the reason behind my clothes,” you look down at your feet, feeling your face heat up. You hated this.  “I know,” Virginia pulls you a bit closer. “I just wish you would let me spoil you sometimes.” You make a waving gesture with your hand and they drop it. They know you well enough to know what you have said if you had continued talking. You wanted to be independent and not live on your friends. Yes, you could probably ask Robert for a loan for the restaurant, but it just felt wrong not to earn your own money. Robert and his family had worked hard for generations to have the riches they had now. You wanted to do that as well, without shortcuts.  The band that was going to play at the party arrived and Virginia says she needs to deal with them, but that she would be back soon. “I think it is time that you change before Virginia comes back and scolds at you,” you smirk at Robert. He laughs a big belly laugh.  “You are so right, my dear Y/N,” Robert looks around. “Save me a dance later on.” You promise and he walks up the stairs. You twirl around looking at all the pretty lights and feel better than you had in a while. Being with your friends always helped get your spirit up. 

The party was in full swing around you. People were dressed as pirates, mermaids, ghosts and famous people. Robert was dressed as Julius Caesar. You were looking for Virginia because you had not seen her for a while. During the party, men had asked her to dance the whole night, but she had still not accepted a single one, that wasn't her father. She was no were to be seen as you walked around the party. Just as you were about to go ask Robert if he had seen his daughter you saw her standing away from people in the shadows. You hurried over. “Virginia, I been looking for you,” You say as you come closer to her. Her eyes were watery and there were watermarks down her cheeks. In her hand she had a paper tissue that has been torn and twisted. It was clenched in her hand. “Are you all right?” you whisper out. You knew Virginia would not want anyone to see her like this.  “No. I am not. I can’t believe this. I am stood up by a man I never even met. I am stood up again,” Virginia brings the hand with the tissue up to her chest, not looking at you. “Maybe he will be here soon,” you try and make her feel better.  Trying to figure out who could have stood her up in the past. It was not something you had heard about before. Virginia shifts her eyes up to the sky. “Please, please,” she whispers out as a tear falls down her cheek. You quietly dry it with your thumb. It did not feel like she was wishing for Prince Steven.   “Virginia, I am sorry,” you say and take her hand. “I don’t think that will work.” “It always worked before,” Virginia said. “Or almost always.” She looks away from your eyes. The heartbroken look on her face over the wish that had not come true, that you wondered what it could have been? There goes a whisper through the party and someone announces that Prince Steven of Maldonia has arrived at the party. Virginia’s whip around with wide-open eyes. You can see her father walks over to the prince. She dries away her tears with her hand and looks at you. “How do I look?” she asks you and you give her a smile. “Beautiful as always,” you answer honestly.  She gives you a big smile, but it does not really reach her eyes. She walks through the crowd and to her father and Prince Steven. You stand in the sidelines and look on as she bows to him and he kisses her hand. You had to admit he was gorgeous. You were not surprised when he walks out on the dancefloor with Virginia. They looked beautiful together. There is a small tug in your chest. You wanted to find someone to share your life with, but you wanted to be a successful first. Because who would want you as you were? A waiter with hardly any money that worked all the time. You did not have time for dating and falling in love not now.  

Virginia was still dancing around with Prince Steven an hour later. They looked beautiful together and you would believe that Virginia would have a big smile on her face, and she had a smile on, but it seemed fake. To think of it, Virginia had not been herself the whole night and if she thought back to her friend had been acting kind of different for a long time now. It was as she was putting on a happy front for everyone to see. Her smile did not reach her eyes and her laugh was just a tone of.  You turn around to walk over to the snack table. A group of men are talking loudly to the right of you and one of the men are eyeing you. It makes a cold shiver go through your body. It was as if he thought you were a part of the snacks served at the party. You take one of your Beignets and take a bit. It melted on your tongue, which made you really happy. It was a recipe from your father and it was going to be on the menu on your restaurant. You decide to take a glass of punch so you make your way over to the bar, but the men that been talking loudly start walking towards you, so you step to your side, but still one of the men walk right into you and you can feel a cold wet sensation over your upper body. It felt sticky as well.  “Look where you are going,” you mutter at the partygoer that just dumped a whole glass of punch over you.  “Sorry, I did not see you,” the man smirks and looks down at you. “Go along and give me a new glass of punch.” You ball your hands into fists. “I am not here as a server, I am a guest.” you grit your teeth, “Could have fooled me with that outfit,” the man snicker at you. You take a step forward. You hated when people looked down on you. Virginia hurried up to you and the man.  “Y/N, come along with me now,” Virginia says and drags you away from the man. You don't see but she makes a gesture to two of your friends to escort the man from the party.  “Let’s get you out of these wet clothes. I have the perfect dress for you in my room,” Virginia guides you into the mansion and up the stairs. You don’t fight her.  “I am so sorry for that moron down there,” Virginia says as you walk into Virginia's bedroom.  “It’s okay Virginia,” you look down at the floor. “Maybe I should just go home.” “Absolutely not,” Virginia says determinedly. “I need my best friend here with me tonight.” You nod and smile at her. “I saw you dance with Prince Steven,” you say and she looks down at the floor. “He is really something else,” Virginia mutters.  “Not what you had thought?” you tilt your head to the side. “I.. I just..,” Virginia starts and walks over to one of her wardrobes.  “You know you can tell me anything,” You say and walk over to her. “Please tell me what it was you wanted to tell me earlier.” Virginia shakes her head.  “Not tonight,” she says and starts going through her closet. “I just can’t tonight. Can we talk about it after Mardi Gras?” “Of course,” You say and she hands you a beautiful light blue shimmering dress. “Just know I am here for you.” She nods hands you a tiara and begs you to get changed and come down to the party. You agree and she leaves you alone.

30 minutes later you stood dressed in the shimmering light blue dressed and a tiara that hat looked like it was made out of diamonds and silver. If you knew your friend it probably was. You were ready to join the party again, but something was holding you back. You look at your reflection in the mirror. Had you ever been dressed in something so beautiful before? You sigh and walked over to the balcony doors and opened them and stepped out in the moonlight. Maybe Virginia was right? Maybe all she needed to do was wish upon the brightest star in the sky and all her dreams would come true. It couldn't hurt to try, could it?  You found the brightest star and closed your eyes and wished for your restaurant. After a while, you opened your eyes and nothing was different. How long until you knew if it worked? “Excuse me,” you heard a tiny voice. You looked around but saw nobody. “Down here,” the voice said and you looked down at the floor. You let out a yelp. On the floor sat a green frog. Was it the frog that had talked? Can frogs talk or am I going insane? I really must be tired, hallucinating. But then it happens again. The frog opens his mouth and says:  “I am Prince Steven of Maldonia, but you can call me Steve,” the frog bows to you. You let out a scream and run into Virginia’s room. The frog hops after you so you take up the closest thing to you, which is Virginia’s favourite book when they grew up. A book full of fairy tales. “Wait, don’t hit me,” the frog screams out. You stop with the book above your head.  “Give me one good reason why I should not.” The book is still over your head and you are ready to toss it at the frog. “I will not hurt you,” Steve said with his hands raised up in the air.  “I don’t believe you,” you narrow your eyes on the frog. “And how can you be Prince Steven? Virginia is dancing with him right now.” “I don’t know who that is, I am the real Prince Steven,” Steve says still with his hands in the air. “Please, I just want to be a human again. I am not going to hurt you, I promise.”  “Well, that is not something I can help you with,” you slowly lower the book and place it on a table. Because what could a frog do to you? Steve jumps up on the table. He looks down at the book. “Maybe you can,” he says and stamps on the book. “What do you mean?” you raise an eyebrow to him. “Kiss me and I will be human again,” Steve winks at you. “No, never!” You take a step back, scrunching up your face. “Oh, come on, Princess” Steve begs. “Just one little kiss, it won’t kill you.” “I won’t kiss a frog,” you cross your arms over your chest. “If you kiss me I will marry you,” the frog Steve told you looking up at you. “I don’t need a prince or a knight in shining armour.” You say and raises your chin in the air.  “Then what do you need?” Steve asks and takes a slow hop closer to you. A sigh is heard in the room. Should you really tell a frog your problems?  “What I need is money to open my own restaurant.” You look down at the floor, feeling defeated. “If you kiss me, I can get you all the money you want,” the frog answered, with what looked like a grin. “I am rich.” He looked almost proud if a frog could look proud. “So all I need to do is to kiss you,” you muttered. “Kiss a frog and get all the money I need.” The frog nodded. “This sounds almost too good to be true, but what do I get to lose?” You crutch down and pick up the frog. The frog is slimy and kind of gross. Are you really going to kiss a frog? Yes, you are. There was always soap and water to wash your mouth after. After placing Steve on the dresser you close your eyes and inches your mouth closer to the frog. Just as your lips are going to touch you open your eyes and see the frog up and close, so you jump back.  “Juck, juck, juck,” you get out and when you look at Steve, he looks almost hurt. Can a frog look hurt? You don’t say a word, just steady yourself for the kiss. You close your eyes and promise yourself that you will keep them closed this time. You go down for the kiss and when your lips meet there is a light and then everything becomes black. 

~ *~*~*~ *~*~*~ *~*~*~ *~ *~*~*~ *~*~*~

Taglist:

@kaithezaftig

@lumar014

[jay-and-dean]

Love me once, shame on me  Chapter 1 : Watermark.

Serie Summary :

2005. Dean and her are in love. He’s the first. Fist kiss, first friend, first love. And she’s everything he didn’t know he needed. Secrets are shared, promises are made… And broken. 2019. He doesn’t even remember she exists, like nothing was real, like he never told her she was the one. She spent her all life trying to deal with his betrayal. But this time she’s about to unravel the mystery of why Dean Winchester broke her heart.

Love me Once, Shame on me MASTERLIST

READ OTHER STORIES HERE => MASTERLIST

Serie Warnings : Violence, mention of attempt suicide, swearing,Smut, unprotected sex (you are smarter than this), Fluff.

Chapter Warnings :  Violence, mention of attempt suicide, swearing.

Words : 2.3k

gifs not mine, found on google

Watermark

           I look at my arm, gently rubbing the long scar on my skin, and on the other arm. I still can't feel anything with my middle finger on the left hand, I lost all sensitivity on it when I opened my veins many years ago, damaging a nerve with the sharp knife I used.

           When the waiter comes near me, I hide the scars with my very long sleeves as usual and asks for a black coffee with a chocolate muffin. I love chocolate, always have.

           Looking out the window I watch the rain fall on it, forming stripes like infinite tears blurring the world. I warmly smiles when the waiter gives me what I ordered and open the book I brought.

Supernatural "Skin"  by Carver Edlund

           The book is used but I don't really take care of it, bending it in every ways, sometimes reading in the rain, barely sheltering it... Whatever ; I read all the volumes so many times, it could crumble now, it would still be a fair natural death for it.

           Dean Winchester is alive.

           I have to stop thinking about it, and yet, an entire year after hearing this, I still can't deal with this information. He was dead. Again. He was dead and I thought about trying to kill myself again for days... I got out of this life to avoid hearing his name, I travelled the world to run from diners like this one, just to forget about bacon cheese burgers. And years after, I heard it, just like that : Dean Winchester came to Asa Fox funerals.

           My broken heart started beating again... and bleeding to. Nightmares stopped but I couldn't sleep. I had to see him. I had to understand.

           So there I am, in that crappy diner where the chocolate muffin isn't even made of real chocolate, reading to relax, watching the door. If I'm right, he'll come through that door with his brother and his FBI suit to ask questions, not knowing I already solved the case.

           I am about to see his face again, smell him again, hear his voice. I'm about to know if he really forgot about me or if he just doesn't care anymore...

           Fourteen years later.

 *************************

2005

 "Agent Cobain" I say showing her my fake badge.

She half smiles, taking it in her hands and looking deeply in my eyes. The bell rings and the hallway is suddenly crawling with loud, horny teenagers.

"I don't think so Agent" she says with a mocking smirk.

"E-excuse me ?" I stammer.

"FBI badges have a light watermark there, and you're too young to be in charge of a murder case by yourself anyway... Agent Cobain, have you seen your car ?" she smiles.

"What the... listen..."

"Plus, I don't think many FBI agents call their daddy to check in. I heard you earlier..."

Her smile gives me the urge to hit her face and to take her in my arms in the same time. Who is this girl ?

"Oh I see, I'm dealing with the little genius of high school" I grunt through my teeth.

She rolls her eyes and sighs. Her smile fades away and she looks behind her before saying lower :

"If you want to unravel this school's secrets, I suggest you ask teachers, not students... Good luck with that."

 ************************

           The fourth time the door opens, Dean Winchester comes in.

           An older, even more charismatic, stronger, manlier version of the Dean Winchester that once took my virginity.

           My heart is missing beats after beats. I prepared for that, and still, this is almost unbearable. I have to carry my broken heart on my opened wrist, and he doesn't even remember I existed for him.

           I hate him as much as I love him, but some say it's the same thing right ? Every possible emotion is strangling me, it physically hurts. But I'm far too broken to cry, I have no tears anymore, every single one have been shed a long time ago.

           He comes toward me directly, because I'm the only customer apart from the two men eating waffles at the counter and laughing loudly. In an instant, the book is hidden in my big messy bag. I can't stop looking at him, I can't stop remembering.

"Agent Smith" he says with a voice way lower than it was. "Can I ask you a couple of questions ?"

I can't help but smile, looking at the fake badge.

"Do you know how we can tell a badge is authentic ? " I ask with a sad smile.

He looks at me, frowning. I take a sip of my coffee to swallow a piece of my heart stuck in my throat.

"This watermark, just here..." I rub the badge with the tip of my finger, eyes on the picture of him." Is almost impossible to fake."

He stares at me suspiciously for a moment. He is all the same, and yet everything changed. His eyes are darker, his face is still perfectly handsome but he's been through hell, and it shows. It seems like his hair are darker too, and the wrinkles at the corner of his eyes are not just expression lines anymore. Were his shoulders always this broad ? His jaw so strong ? He is a man, and not any man.

"You're not an FBI agent, you're a hunter" I add, taking another sip of coffee.

Dean's eyebrows raise in surprise, and he sits in front of me. That's when I can smell him. I swallows hard, hiding behind my now empty cup.

"Are you a hunter ?" he asks low, looking behind him like someone could understand our conversation.

"Yeah, sometimes."

"How can you be a hunter sometimes ?" he asks with a soft smile, putting his badge back in his pocket.

"Long story... So you're a hunter" I say looking at the Impala through the window.

He still have this car, the guy died like twice at least, but he always drive he's father's car fourteen years later... How I loved that car, how I waited for it to park in front of high school, how I stopped the music and opened the window to hear it come, lazily laying on my bed, how I loved feeling the leather on my sweaty skin, when he was making love to me on the backseat...

"And judging by your nice taste in cars, you must be Dean Winchester" I state trying not to stare at him.

"How do you know ?" he asks with an amused look.

"No long hair, not Sam" I lie.

"Oh you know my brother too ?"

"You are kind of famous, you know. Coffee ?"

 ****************************

2005

"So this is where you live ?" I ask trying not to sound judgmental.

The small trailer is parked in the middle of nowhere, a folding chair and a small table in front of it.

"Yep" she says with that singing voice of her, opening the door. "Must be very different from your house."

"Not that much" I mutter, thinking about the crappy motel I'm staying at. At least this place seems clean and quiet.

She disappears inside and comes back holding two fresh beers. The late sun is making her frown while she sits on the step before her door, handing me one of the beers.

"Are you even allowed to drink ?" I ask, already knowing she's not the kind of girl to follow the rules, she's way too smart for that.

"Do you really care ? You're nor even a real cop !"

When the night falls, we're still talking. She told me about that missing teacher and what she found about him, all by herself. She doesn't even know about the supernatural but she still closer to solve the case than local police. This girl is really smart...

"What I don't understand is how could mister Johnson avenge himself being dead" she says handing me another beer. "Or maybe he had it all planned... Still, it doesn't make sense."

For me it makes perfect sense, and she just almost solved the case.

"So where are your parents ?" I dare, looking around.

"Hum... I'm alone, I'm an emancipated minor. But hey, not for long, I'll be eighteen in two months. Freedom !"

My heart sank at the idea of her being alone. I don't see the trailer the way I saw it minutes ago. It seems sad, isolated.

"I'm sorry" I say looking down.

"Don't be. I fought for that. Anything but foster home or orphanage, for me it was hell..."

"I mean, for your parents..."

"Hum. Yeah" she shrugs.

She look at me in the eye and smile widely. She stands and go inside, then brings other beers, handing it to me. That's when I notice her cheek are a little pink, like she was just a little drunk or awkward.

"I told you everything, you interrogated me four times in a week, and you're nor even a real cop. I think it's my turn to ask questions !" she says, giving a light kick on the chair I'm sitting on.

How can I tell her I just wanted to see her a little more ? I really feel like we could be friends, she remind me of Sam so much, and I miss him like hell. I'm just so lonely.

"Who are you Dean ? Are you some kind of secret hero ? Like Batman ? Or are you a serial killer trying to seduce me ? How can somebody using fake credit cart to pay a simple donut can have a car that beautiful ?"

"Wow wow !" I raise my hands. "Fake credit carts now ?"

"I've been in the street, Dean"

How can she see so clearly through me and not be afraid ? I mean, anybody would be suspicious. I sigh and look at the Impala parked beside her old wreck, all shiny and proud.

"Maybe you're the serial killer" I say with the more charming smile I have in me. "Maybe you'll kill me and take my car."

She laughs and stands, taking her oversized hoodie off, leaving her in a black Nirvana tank top. I wasn't expecting that, a babe body underneath the "fuck you" look.

"Agent Cobain would never have worked on you" I say forcing myself to look away from her chest.

"Never !" she laughs. "It's dark."

She disappears inside again and I wonder why I am still here, but I guess I just don't want to go back to the motel and watch crappy TV ; what's wrong with making friends ?

           Suddenly, a myriad of colored light bulb come to life everywhere near us, like little shy stars. And I can't help but smile like a child at the beauty of it. When she comes back, she hands me pizza with that already familiar smile and only then I realize I'm just a little drunk, and I want this evening to last all my life.

 ******************************

             Dean takes the monster's head off with a sharp swing of his machete but the thing keeps on moving and another grabs him from behind, trying to bite him. I shoot three times in his head, making Dean close his eyes tightly like I would miss him and shoot him instead... It won't happen, I learn with the best.

           This of course doesn't kill it but the impact free Dean.

"How do we kill those fuckers !" he groans seeing too other zombie-ish monsters coming toward us.

Sun. Only sun can burn those creatures, I know it as I already discovered what they are. But I can't just tell Dean, and night is still young. The only way would be to cut their legs to keep them immobile, drag them outside and wait for morning.

           When one of them takes my head and smash it on the wall, Dean screams my name but I fall on my knee, dizzy and unfocused for a moment. He can't come to me, already fighting two of them, he calls my name but I don't answer. I've seen much worse and I'm a lonely hunter, I can handle myself, he'll learn to trust me. When the creature bends on me to lift me, thinking I'm stunned, I shoot his face at point blank range. He stumbles back and I start shooting his knees, I shoot it so many times his legs almost detach from his body. And I have no bullets anymore.

"At least it can't move anymore !" I laugh, knowing I must look like a psycho.

Then I come to Dean, still struggling with the overly strong creatures and take the machete he's dropped to cut his attackers in half one by one.

"Fuck, you're daunting !" Dean says scattering the other zombies until we're surrounded by moving pieces of monsters.

"What do we do now ?" I say already knowing the answer.

"Let me call my brother, let me call Sam."

Sammy... I only seen him once, on one of the best days of my life. I remember talking to him on that cafeteria, dazzled by the southern sun through the window, his eyes wandering on the purple hickey his brother made on my throat, far from knowing Dean did it, and that his brother was waiting for me outside. I was so thrilled to meet him after my lover talked so much about him, after he trusted me enough to let me convince him to drive us all the way to Stanford, to check on his baby brother.

           Maybe Sam will remember me. Maybe he won't. Maybe he will have forgotten me just because he only spent an afternoon and an evening with me. Maybe he will have forgotten me the way Dean have... Like I never existed.

Feedback is soooo appreciated ;)

[weekendwarriorblog]

30 Minute Experiment: Work #30ME

So I’ve already gone through a couple Pink Floyd titles and one from The Cult, so I might as well start working my way through The Godfathers’ Birth School Work Death in terms of topics for this 30 Minute Experiment. (For anyone just joining, the idea is that I pick a topic and write about it for 30 minutes straight, without interruptions. When the time is up, I post. No edits, no re-reads, probably many regrets.)  Okay, let’s do this...

It will surprise absolutely no one that I’m a bit of a workaholic and I’ve been one for most of my life. I think my first job must have been when I was 14 or 15 or so when I got a bicycle and started delivering newspaper, a job that I quite liked because it was a quiet suburban neighborhood in Westport where not a lot happened. (I do remember one day being flashed by an older woman who came to the door wearing absolutely nothing not realizing I was on the other side leaving her newspaper.)

One of the weird things going on in this pandemic is that after losing a writing gig I had just started, it gets harder and harder to push myself to do the much-needed work I have to do, whether it’s doing these #30Mes or writing my weekly Weekend Warrior column or cleaning or working on some of my long dormant screenplays or even writing to my imprisoned penpal (who I just got a letter from so I need to get back to him fairly soon.)

At a certain point, everything seems like work, even if it’s just scheduling time to hang out on Zoom with friends or family, which is something I did far less of in the days pre-pandemic (Can we maybe start a new numbering system so that 2020 is Year One and every year that follows would be 1 Post-Pandemic for 2021, etc? It feels suitable.)

But this whole time and even over the past four years I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to find some form of steady work, and sadly, things were so unstable pre-pandemic that it’s only gotten harder as more of my movie-writing colleagues are losing jobs and there are far more opportunities. I mean, anyone who reads my Weekend Warrior every week (or EVER!) will know that there are still movies being released, even if not all of them are getting any kind of theatrical release. Some of them are even quite good. 

I was talking to one of my colleagues last night about the work situation and how everything just came to a stop in March when most of us had things planned or in the works, which unfortunately revolved mostly around movies. 

But the current situation has become a great equalizer in terms of people needing to cover a lot more smaller indie movies, TV series and streaming stuff if they want to keep their jobs. I’m pretty sure that the job market is going to look very different in a few months as the country starts slowly reopening, and I think the people who don’t want to do the actual work like going to see movies and having varied tastes, won’t survive. They’ll just give up and go take one of those regular 9 to 5 desk jobs that are out there.

Believe me, I’ve been ready to make that transition for a couple years as I lost a lot of freelance outlets, some being closed, others just going in a different direction. It’s tough out there, and it’s really hard for me to take any sort of dog-eat-dog mentality when it comes to work, because I don’t like seeing my friends struggling. That hurts me almost as much as my own struggle (which I’m happy to say has taken an interesting and slightly positive turn this week).

Sure, I’m definitely ready to be done with this and to get back to work, even though it’s been some time since I’ve had any steady work hours -- probably the Tracking Board where I was doing a 9 to 5 shift five days a week -- and I’m going to have to get back into some of the good working habits. I already try to go to sleep at a reasonable hour and don’t stay up past midnight playing video games (or Android games) or doing some of the other distractions that would keep anyone else from getting work done.

I mean, if you read today’s Weekend Warrior, you’ll see that I spent a lot of time watching and writing about a bunch of movies just so that people will have some idea that there is good movie entertainment still coming their way which hopefully they’ll look into it. I don’t want to too far down the tangential wormhole of the movie biz right -- I’ll have plenty of time to talk about that over the next few months -- but the pandemic equalizer that I mentioned hasn’t really helped the smaller indie movies as I’d hoped since people still would rather throw on Netflix or Hulu or HBO and binge watch some show or another. 

I have a LOT of stuff that I’ve been meaning to watch but my desire to keep my brain in gear and stay motivated in terms of my writing has led to things like this experiment, which I’ve done a pretty good job keeping up with. If I really look at this to see how it helps me in terms of earning a living, I think I can say fairly that it’s a daily job that forces me to think and write quickly, which is something that’s important for most of the better writing jobs out there. And it only takes 30 minutes a day, so it’s not like it’s taking me away from any of the time-wasting activities I’d love to do instead.

Sure, I’m definitely trying to use this time productively even if the “work” I’m doing doesn’t do much to help me financially, although I will say that doing this stuff helps me both mentally and emotionally, which is half the battle when you’re dealing with a job and people you have to work with. I learned that the hard way at a few of my recent jobs post-CS, but I’m not going to get into all of that. I believe very strongly that sometimes you just have to do something to maintain your own mental health even when it’s not the best decision on the grand scheme of things.

I do miss having some of the structure of a job in my life even though I feel my calendar is just filling up with other things, even if it’s just doing things to help support my friend’s own mental and emotional health by taking part in their activities. Believe me, as much as the monotony of the day-to-day may have been getting to me a few weeks back, I feel like I’ve moved past that, and now I’m so focused and disciplined about getting things done, who knows? Maybe I’ll even have a few screenplays done by the time I’m allowed to go to a movie theater or press screening again.

I can only imagine how much harder this is for my friends and family who have gotten used to going to an office five days a week and have built their entire lives around that structure. Of my immediate family, only my sister and her husband and kids were doing anything in that vein, since both my brother and I have always been homebodies for the most part.

Right now, I’m not sure if I could even deal with going on the subway every day to go to a job, but thankfully, more businesses are figuring out how to stay running while allowing employees to work from home. At least as a writer, I don’t necessarily have to be anywhere, although as I’ve said before, I still prefer to see movies on the big screen... preferably without my own name watermarked across it. (This is done to avoid piracy, obviously, since it can be traced right back to me.)

Although I’m slowly inching towards a point in life where most people are ready to retire, I think I’ll be good to keep working in some capacity or other for at least the next ten years. The down time in between jobs these past few years has made it far easier for me to be thrifty so it’s no like I’m trying to support a ridiculous comic book habit anymore and have less need for consumerism. 

I can’t remember if I discussed during the “money” topic but I do feel better when i know i have money just in case I want to do something fun when that’s allowed again. There have been too many times in recent years where I’ve had to decline an invite to go somewhere just because I was worried about how even spending $20 might affect my ability to eat for that week. (Yes, things got that bad!)

I guess we’ll see where things go in the next few months, but I don’t think you’ll meet another person who is more than ready to go to work for 40 to 60 hours a week once again, since I’ve also gotten better at scheduling my time. I mean, it’s still not great but when it comes to working, especially as a writer, I feel that I’m always getting better at facing new challenges, and I do hope some will still come my way.

I have about five minutes left to go in today’s #30ME, and I’m not sure if I have that much more to say about “work” right at this moment, but I do want to say that if you got far into today’s ramble, I hope you’ll drop me a line with some suggestions and opinions. It doesn’t mean I will change what I’m doing since as I’ve said, these are more for me than anyone else, but it would be nice if someone is reading them and maybe it changes their opinion of me (hopefully in a favorable way). 

That’s it for me today but I’ll be back tomorrow..maybe talking about the “Birth” or “Death” part of that Godfathers song. 

[officialinuyasha]

Official Art is free use as long as it is not used for monetary gain, and I will never ask anyone for money for my pictures, and I was told I am the only person that actually credits the official animators and artists. Each image of the anime is directly ripped RAW Japanese versions, that are ages old by the way. There are probably better ones out there now. Because had these when the English dub hadn’t came out on my Windows XP. About that, they should be in 1080, but since they were used into WMM I had to recolor all of them and increase their quality myself. I don’t like taking screenshots from YouTube like most people do. Not only do I increase the quality but there are assets I enjoy changing them from the anime. Most people can’t even tell it’s changed because it’s “that good” they say. The only thing I ask if you are sharing my edits, just credit me for taking to time to increasing the resolution, ripping, and alters. I do a lot of screen-stitching also. There’s a lot of them and some I haven’t even posted. But here are some of my favorites -

Besides that, I also like posting basic screen caps with my watermark on it. Because I did it. I don’t have to explain myself on that. Because it originated from my RAW rips, I have every right to credit the official animators and myself for doing the work. I see a lot of people post their watermarks on official images, even when it comes to illegal manga scan sites. I don’t see anyone complaining about that.

If you see my watermark on it, like Max’s it’s because I have his permission to slightly alter it as a Profile Picture! - and I usually have their credit or their watermark on it also whether in the image or in the description! Since Max intentionally made art for me also, it’s kinda a given.

I always see @redrobelover talk about bullying and certain fandoms. I can tell you what I see.

Here is what I see most of -

People “bully” others if someone is asking where a certain fan art came from - With absolutely no intent to steal it. They know they didn’t make the art.

But as soon as someone constantly credits each individual animator, they don’t care and the official animators are swept under the rug. These people are paid, just like fan artists. But they are way less known. I hardly ever see anyone talking about the animators of InuYasha. When they do, it makes me very happy and excited.

They also think it’s okay for someone to share Fan Art from a person that intentionally left because of drama like this. Basically, “this person left, probably because their art was being stolen and sold on Chinese merchandise. But I���m going to share it anyway.” And to them, that’s completely fine.

Can you see where all this hypocrisy is?

-

I’ll tell you all a story. Our friend was from Tumblr since 2009. I won’t give out her identity, but a lot of these people know. And she recognizes a lot of this toxicity and drama. She used to write a lot of fan-fictions and became really well-known. She was a very popular role-player.

She knows and can name people, can predict how people are -exactly- on here.

Well she actually left because people wouldn’t stop fighting, making fake accounts to go and attack everyone. This stuff is stupid. I just don’t get what’s so fun in that.

-

A story about me.

I had a friend on here I knew for years. She used to take a lot of my edits and I wouldn’t say anything because she was my friend. Even if it bugged me, I felt like she wasn’t doing any harm in that. All I asked of her was to at least tell me or credit me. Which I don’t think she ever did. It was always odd to find out from another person that she was doing this, or stumbling upon it myself.

The sad part was, I saw her as a really close friend of mine. And when my life began ta change dramatically I went and told her everything. I wrote a whole novel for her. In hopes that she was going to be supportive of my life changes and choices I was making during my transition and the person I am meant ta be with. Like most of my friend are supportive of it and asked me a whole buncha questions about it. They were happy.

Unfortunately I never got the ecstatic answer from her. Instead she ghosted on me and I think blocked me. I never understood why. But I was told it was probably because we have the same mind set in a lot of things. So I will never hate on her ever. I don’t have a reason to. I just wished things like that was better.

-

We are all a family. We all like InuYasha. InuYasha is supposta be a safe space.

-

Something I wrote in August 20th, 2018

My name is InuYasha, yes legally. Yes I'm the only person on record with that name in the US atleast. I am a transman. I've been on hormones for two years now! 💪💉 Damn those "emojis" look hella weird... August 2016 was when I started my hormones. Anyway. I'm in a relationship with @officialkagome , her name is Kagome she's a transwoman! I really came around on YouTube 2007 as TheHanyouInuYasha, now displayed as "OfficialInuYasha". I also run the FaceBook group "Official InuYasha Group" which is increasingly popular and extremely active with almost 5,000 members now! My sister really helped push me to go for the doctor's appointment for my transgender diagnosis in order for me to start my hormones. The series InuYasha really helped me get in touch with my true self, as InuYasha I see myself as one with. Being an outcast and having to make my own world was very, very difficult. I went through a lot of depression and anger during certain times and was told I could not be "InuYasha" because they told me I was a "girl". Just like in the series how the ignorant people also pestered InuYasha being half demon, that it was "unnatural" to them. I continued on, struggling as InuYasha. I started cosplaying InuYasha around 2005. I remember going to my neighbors house to watch it pre-recorded in Japanese dub! I was only about 10 years old. My grandma helped me make my first outfit. We made the top from a Wizard robe and Dancer pants patterns. I have gone through four different outfits, now 7 wigs, and 6 different Tetsusaigas. My current wig was made by Alichii from deviantART since 2004 based on Katie Bairs method, made from 3 different wigs. A historical wig. My current outfit is the Officially licensed VIZ Media outfit! It's my treasure. Kagome in the series really helped me alot to learn and to love. I have had many issues with haters, stalkers and copycats. Keh! But that won't stop me!

- The response @officialkagome wrote after me -

My name is Kagome, yes; it really is. InuYasha inspired me to share my own story. I am a transwoman, and have known I was a female my entire conscious life. I was told I couldn't be Kagome because I wasn't a girl. I was punished a great deal and abused for being trans. I was told I was wrong, and sick for 'thinking' I was a girl, I was invisible to everyone around me. I grew into an aloof teenager that thought I knew the evils of the world, until when 14 years old; I was sexually assaulted by three men while at a house party without my parents knowledge. My world fell to pieces, and who I was died. I spiralled, I lost all respect for myself. I never was dated, I gave myself to bad guys. I made horrible choices and I still carry the shame of what those men turned me into.  I watched InuYasha a lot then, and I found similarity in myself and Kagome. She was everything I always dreamed of being. Kind, brave, beautiful and pure. My first Impression of InuYasha was that he was a jerk; but I got to learn more about how he felt different in his world, and didn't belong. Before I knew it, I fell deeply in love with him. He saved my life and made me feel like that strong woman I knew I was. I spent the next 13+ years submitting to the fact that I would never really be able to see InuYasha, I begged for dreams, If I could only see him.. Meanwhile, InuYasha was going through the same exact thing. We crossed paths on so many occasions, even unknowingly, we grew up in the same cities, our whole lives lead up to us finding one another and life blessed me, and brought InuYasha to me in the most ironically fated way. We are BOTH trans! He gets me, And he waited for me just as long as I waited for him. There is so much coincidence in our meeting. It's haunting. He looks at me, a pile of my trauma; and he loves my broken pieces back together. InuYasha has ALWAYS come for me, and I may have lost faith; but I am glad I didn't. InuYasha found me in the darkness; and now together we move towards tomorrow. We have always been the same since the very beginning. We ARE InuKag~

-

Thank you for all the asks.

I will respond to each one. All will be animated, which I know they are piled up.

So send all Asks. Let’s see how fun we can make this -

-

- Inu-Yasha -

[gaycrouton]

The Spy Who Loves Her Boss

Hey! I absolutely loved “The Spy Who Dumped Me”, and being it was my two favorite actresses I HAD to write something. I think we all related to Morgan hardcore, and I just wanted to explore how she might feel coming in that Monday. Obviously it must’ve gone well since her an Audrey were shown working for them a year later, lol. Hope you enjoy!

Morgan wasn’t shy. Since she was a little girl, running around and entertaining people was the one thing that made her truly, unquestionably happy. She loved seeing smiles on people’s faces and she loved hearing an audience’s appreciation. It made her feel fulfilled. Sometimes her outgoing nature helped her land acting gigs, sometimes it embarrassed Audrey, and sometimes it made her hit on powerful women that intimidated the living shit out of her.

God, that woman.

Sure, she was a stereotypical young, gay woman who idolized attractive, older women. It was a stereotype for a reason after all, and that MI6 just proves it. She’s a living breathing renaissance painting. She carries herself with absolute power and femininity, as strong as she is beautiful. She’s what every woman dreams of being. Though, she didn’t know if she wanted to be her or be in her. Morgan couldn’t get her out of her mind, yet she didn’t even know her name.

So far, she’d only had two interactions with her and she’d call them both moderately successful. She wasn’t necessarily dismissed, so she’d call that a plus. Okay, she may have laid it on a teeny bit thick when they first met at the Intelligence Headquarters, but, again, who doesn’t love compliments? And there were just so many things to compliment, it took awhile for her to cover them all. Morgan was a trained actor, so she was pretty astute at picking up facial subtleties; Government Bey couldn’t keep that ghost of a smile hidden well enough when she was getting complimented.

Also, as she had reminded Audrey plenty of times since, a stone cold fox like that would not have willingly touched a person unless she wanted to. If she wasn’t at least amused at the bare minimum, there would have been no reason for MI6 to fully wrap her arm around her. Audrey insisted she had just been teasing her, but that didn’t dissuade Morgan.

She also trusted her enough to give her the honor of telling Sebastian he could come back to work. Of course, he still called her immediately after anyay, but still, the sentiment still stays.

She knew it was bold, going through with her insistence to show up on Monday. This was the British Military Intelligence after all, not a resistant acting gig, but god she wanted this. Not just working alongside a woman like her, but to live this type of high-pace life of excitement. Doing something for the greater good that made her feel alive. She was hung up on after asking what she liked in her coffee, but she’d gotten worse rejections in her life.

She spent the entire weekend nervously thinking about what would happen on Monday, and now the day was here. Sebastian, probably with the encouragement of Audrey, had agreed to let her accompany him to the office. She ran to the local Starbucks before he picked her up, spending ten minutes analyzing the menu, hypothesizing what the enchanting MI6 lady might possibly want. After agonizing deliberation, she settled on the safest option and got a plain iced coffee, which was now leaving little watermarks on her jeans from the condensation on the plastic.

“Do you think she’ll kick me out?” Morgan asked, breaking the silence. She honestly knew she would be, but she wanted to know what to expect. She was trying to formulate different possible responses to the situation, so she could hide her nervousness behind a mask of jovial understanding.

“I’m positive she’ll kick you out,” he laughed gently, not making fun of her but enjoying her insistence.

Morgan nodded in understanding before remembering something important, “Hey, what’s her name?”

Sebastian was silent for a disconcerting amount of time and she figured he wasn’t allowed to tell her, but his actual reasoning was even more ridiculous. “Umm, I’m not actually sure.”

Morgan’s jaw dropped open and she slapped the side of his arm, ignoring the way he winced and grabbed the still-recovering appendage. “Shut up! Is she like one of those bad ass boss characters in the movies? She just hides namelessly in the shadows until she needs to deal out orders and assign high-intensity missions?” This woman could not get any more badass.

“Ahh, no. I just-” he drew out his words in slight embarrassment, “-uh, can’t remember.”

Morgan turned fully in her seat to glare at him, “That woman granted you full access to know her name and you forgot!” she exclaimed, her voice raising with each word.

He let out a little chagrined laugh and tried to cover up his foolishness, “Well, we just call her ‘boss’.”

Sebastian was cool in her books, don’t get her wrong, but right now he was being such a stupid man. He clearly could recognize beauty, he fell for Audrey after all, but to ignore the enigma he worked so closely to was a brainless misstep for someone who worked in the Intelligence Department. “Sebastian, Sebastian, Sebastian. My handsome, but yet oh so misguided friend, I am disappointed in you.”

“Don’t forget I’m the only one getting you access to her,” he warned jokingly.

“Disappointment absolved,” she beamed immediately.

They spent the rest of the drive chit chatting and arguing about music trivia before arriving to the secret headquarters. She’d been so focused on what she’d say to her government crush that she hadn’t considered there might be an issue getting in. Apparently Sebastian had, and for that she was forever grateful. Through each security check point, he explained she was one of the American Girls that helped solve the issue with Duffer. Apparently, everyone there hated ‘Harvard Boy’ and not only let her in, but thanked her, much to her delight.

As they were walking down the hall to what she presumed was the boss lady’s office, Sebastian leaned down to her and whispered while walking, “Just so we’re on the same page. I don’t want to be put back on forced leave, so as far as I’m aware, she told you during your phone call that you needed to show up with me and I’m simply trusting you.”

“She did tell me to show up with you today,” she admonished, already acting the part.

“No she didn-oh, I see. You’re good at that,” he grinned.

“They didn’t hire me in that Blockbuster ad for nothing.”

“It’s too bad Progresso won’t be graced with your talent,” a husky feminine voice quipped from right behind them.

Both she and Sebastian stopped in their tracks and turned around simultaneously, seeing the statuesque blonde standing just a foot behind them. She even had heels on and they hadn’t heard her. It was equal parts terrifying and arousing. It took Morgan a second to register, but a smile broke out on her face when she realized the G-woman remembered her prior engagement. “I’m touched you remembered!” she exclaimed in excitement.

“Yes. I spent all weekend thinking about it,” she deadpanned.

“Really?”

“No.” She sighed as Morgan’s enthusiasm wasn’t dampened and turned to Sebastian. “So I take it you’re responsible for her being here?”

“She told me-” Sebastian started, but was cut off by Morgan. If this was going to be the last opportunity she had to have a conversation with this woman, she was going to monopolize on it.

“Yes, I convinced him you told me to bring me during our phone call. Are you impressed I was able to pull the wool over one of your own?” she boasted proudly, ignoring the slight nudge Sebastian gave her.

The woman regarded her for a moment before teasing, “Yes, blown away.” Morgan smiled as Sebastian watched in nervous anticipation of reprimandation. “My office, both of you.” Words that inspired optimism in Morgan brought dread in Sebastian as they walked through the door at the end of the hall.

Her office was exactly as she would have expected. It was sleek, classy, and elegant. It looked pristine and stylish and she was still staring in awe as the other two took a seat. “Morgan,” the sultry voice called out. Her heart fluttered in her chest at the sound of her name coming from the woman in that beautiful british accent that haunted her daydreams.

“Hmm?” she hummed while examining a potted plant to see if it was real or not.

“Sit down.” Morgan did as told and sat in the seat directly across from her.

Before she had a chance to start reprimanding them, Morgan perked up in her seat. “Hi, sorry. I just wanted a chance to have formal introductions. I haven’t gotten a chance to meet you. I’m-”

“Morgan Freeman. Thirty four years old, born January of 1984. You went to University for Theatre and you’ve gotten sporadic acting jobs ever since. You recently took it upon yourself to transport a piece of highly confidential government property with your long term friend Audrey Stockton. Now you’ve shown up hoping for a job.” MI6 finished.

Morgan sat there, jaw agape in pure shock. She knew so much about her. Off the top of her head nonetheless. It was like she could hear her thoughts because she added, “I’m the head of the Intelligence Bureau. I have access to everything you’ve ever done.”

“You missed two important facts though,” Morgan lilted, receiving a cocked eyebrow. “I also brought you this today,” passing the iced coffee to her over the desk, pleased when she took it from her with a millimeter smile. “And I am beyond flattered by your impeccable memory.”

She was met with a slightly amused stare as the woman took a sip of her coffee. She set the cup on her desk and reached over, extending her hand out for Morgan who accepted it hasilty. “Wendy Davis, head of the Security Intelligence Service. Appreciative of your coffee.”

“Shut up! Wendy Davis-”

“Not that Wendy Davis,” Wendy sighed, still indulging Morgan in the world’s longest handshake.

“I know, but Morgan Freeman, Wendy Davis, what a match in incidental-celebrity-names heaven our we, Wendy!” she exclaimed. Wendy let out a breath of amusement as she disentangled herself from Morgan’s hand.

“Hi, Sebastian Henshaw, an actual employee here, awaiting acknowledgement of his existence,” Sebastian declared, interrupting the serenity of the moment Morgan was creating.

“I apologize, Henshaw,” she sighed, taking another drink of her coffee before spinning around and grabbing a file out of her desk.

“No problem, Wendy,” he beamed.

“Nope, you call me Boss and Boss only,” she reprimanded without looking up from the file.

“Yes, Boss,” he apologized, ignoring the taunting smile Morgan was sending his way.

“So. As long as you’re feeling healed enough, I have an assignment in China that needs to be dealt with. Apparently there’s been a breach in security systems and information is being mishandled by the Chinese mafia. It most likely will be a longer assignment, possibly taking even a year,” she explained.

“Excuse me,” Morgan spoke up, a bit thrown she wasn’t walking home right now. Wendy’s piercing blue eyes shot up over the file as she looked expectantly at Morgan. “May I lend my services on this mission?” she asked.

“You’re sitting in the briefing, are you not?” Wendy said as if it was obvious.

Sebastian and Morgan looked at each other before looking back at her and exclaiming, “Wait, what?”in perfect unison.

“Well, you seemed to display at least a moderate amount of competency and skill during this recent escapade. I chose a mission of a similar calibre and I figured if you come back alive, we can see about keeping you on for good. Perhaps you find it’s not as much fun as you believe it to be, or maybe your living on this last mission was a fluke or luck. We’ll see,” she explained.

Morgan felt like she was floating. This morning she woke up thinking the highlight of her day would be seeing this beautiful woman, now it was seeing this beautiful woman and getting to continue her dream job. “Oh my gosh. Thank you so much,” she exclaimed standing up. She pressed her index and middle finger to her forehead in a salute and continued her gratitudes, “I promise I will do my best work and I will absolutely do everything in my power to make you proud.” She let her fingers fly away from her in a full salute as Wendy clenched her jaw to avoid smiling.

“Are you sure about this?” Sebastian asked while sitting down.

“I see potential,” she said politely, giving Morgan an appreciative glance before putting on the mask of strict professionalism. “However, we will need to do some official paperwork and procedures before you can go out into the field as an official, interim, agent.”

“Of course,” Morgan replied, trying to mimic the severity and conviction of the woman across from her.

“Oh, and I would like you to ask Audrey if she would also join. I have a feeling that she equals out your eccentricities. You seem to be a good team.”

“Oh, you’re the best. Your wish is my command,” Morgan gushed, poorly concealing her excitement.

Officially one of the best days of her life.

Hope you enjoyed! It was a fun challenge writing this! -Nicole (Twitter/Tumblr: gaycrouton)

[aftgficlibrary]

Soulmates

Apparently it was meant to be (Note: this post was long so it for now only includes completed fics. Will be updated when others are completed)

last updated: 31 January 2019

Coming Home by wesawbears (T | 1,235 | 1/1)

Kevin, Jean, and Jeremy are all born with two soulmate marks instead of one. It takes them a while to find each other.

Falls by nekojita for ApprenticedMagician (M |  7,002 | 1/1)

Nathaniel ends up at Edgar Allan/the Nest after all, and what helps him through everything (Tetsuji's abusive demands, RIKO, being pushed to his limits to be the best) is often the dreams he has of the young French boy whose name is embellished on his wrist - Jean. The boy whom his mother told him to never mention to anyone, especially his father.

So what happens when that boy ends up at Evermore one day?

A soul mate/Neil/Jean fic for apprenticedmagician on Tumblr for ATFG_Exchange's winter gift exchange.

Your Face by lanalua (T | 1,464 | 1/1)

Each of Andrew's drawings of his soulmate is different: different haircut, hair color, eye color... That can't be good. 

this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart by giucorreias (Not Rated | 483 | 1/1)

it's the small details

I felt your pain when you were gone byElfo98 (G | 3,533 | 1/1)

Another Soulmate AU where Neil and Andrew can feel each other's pain and how the Foxes find out.

Or: my take on the Baltimore incident because I can't seem to get enough of it.

Paint Splatter Freckles and Godly Go Fishby Issylang for quensty (G | 1,115 | 1/1)

"When Jean was younger, much younger, he would sit in his mother’s lap while she traced the sun on his left shoulder blade and sang love songs in soft French. He would stare at the black heart on her wrist, the one that perfectly matched his father’s, and imagine the little girl that shared his sun. When Jeremy was very little his mom and dad would corral him and his older sister into the living room after dinner. With a child in each lap, they would recount the history of soulmates; how Zeus, in fear of their power, had split the people of earth in half, and they were destined to spend the rest of their lives in search for their other half. How, in a moment of kindness, Zeus had marked the pairs, so that they could follow their symbol to their other half." Just a cute, short Jerejean Soul mate au. 

Marked by beautifulmagick (G | 1,164 | 1/1)

Neil Josten's soulmate mark is on his shoulder. Andrew can never forget that.

Empty Kiss by Leahelisabeth (fortheloveofcamelot) for ApprenticedMagician (M | 1,987 | 1/1)

Based on a Tumblr prompt for an empty kiss.

met you in the dark (you lit me up) byharrytomlinsonwhoops (M | 3,085 | 1/1)

it starts like this:

the elevator doors are closing, and aaron, after seeing one of the cheerleaders inside, doesn't bother running for it.

she holds the door for him anyway. she's got curly hair, and dark brown skin. her eyes are a bright green that he doesn't expect when she stares down at him. she's half a head taller, but he finds that he doesn't mind looking up to her.

"hello," she says, her eyes lighting up, and aaron thinks: oh. oh no.

a memory unrepressed by orphan_account (T | 7,387 | 1/1)

“So, what, you think I’m real, you’re real? That we’ve somehow… I don’t know, astral projected to this place?”

“I don’t know what I think,” Thea said slowly, a strain on her voice as if she hated to admit it.

“Well, the sun is– Fuck.”

“What?” Thea looked around as well, then froze.

There was no sun. There were no clouds. No shadows. It was indisputably light out, as if it were day, but the light seemed to have no source.

Groaning, Dan buried her face in her hands. “What is this, I don’t like it.”

let me love the pain you're going through by MadHatterNO7 (T | 1,526 | 1/1)

Neil remembers his mother saying, "Soulmates don’t exist. They aren’t real. They are a burden that would get you killed."

Neil supposes he knows why.

His mother's soulmate was never his father.

Watermark by fairietailed (T | 4,689 | 1/1)

He hops into the kitchen on one foot, catching his mother before she carries the bowl of peas she’s holding into the dining room.

“Jeremy?” Her eyebrows pull together in concern at the look on his face. “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” he says, sticking out his foot. “I think it’s my soul mate?”

--

In which bruises and scars from your soulmate appear on your skin, and Jeremy's skin is a myriad of colored stains.

What are you scared of? by shipsgalore (T | 1,704 | 1/1)

“I couldn’t -- you weren’t supposed to be real. I didn’t think that I would ever have somebody love me, Jeremy. I’m just broken. I’m broken and you can’t love something that’s broken.” He wants to take his hand out of Jeremy’s, to end this entire discussion, but the burning of his nerve endings is welcoming. He wants to feel this every day of his life. 

hard to find by jaylocked (M | 3,199 | 1/1)

Jean has learned to hate the letters on his ribs.

He can remember a time before, back when he still had the sky above him and his future before him, when the letters fueled his insatiable, childish imagination. But then he lost the sky, lost his future, lost his language, and the letters changed.

accept yourself by jaylocked (T | 6,498 | 1/1)

In which Jeremy Knox tries to figure out what soulmates mean in a world of divorced parents, sappy best friends, Exy, and scowling, abused backliners.

My Own by hazelNuts (T | 728 | 1/1)

Andrew doesn't believe in soulmates, so what's the point of having a soulmate mark?

I keep a close watch on this heart of mine by A_Nobelmonster (Not Rated | 839 | 1/1)

Prompt: Andrew and Aaron are platonic soulmates that can feel each others pain.

Pain by ke_xia (M | 810 | /1)

There’d been a point once, when Andrew was a boy, that he’d been told stories of soulmates and had had grand visions of finding his own. Sharing a soul with one person who could feel your pain and whose pain you felt in return- now that felt like true love. And a soulmate had to love you; that was their entire reason for existing. Not like his mom or his dad, whoever they were, nor any number of the foster parents he’d gone through, nor any of the “brothers” and “sisters” he’d had throughout his few years in the system. No, none of them had ever loved him, but there was someone out there, someone who did even though they didn’t even know him yet.

/Graphic Depictions Of Violence /Rape/Non-Con

Exactly by jostenminyard (onceuponahundred) (G | 783 | 1/1)

A soulmate au where all the foxes (minus Nicky). But Neil broke his because its dangerous to love. Andrew broke his because fuck love. Aaron broke his because Andrew made him as part of the promise. Dan broke hers because of the man hating thing. Matt's broke on accident while he was high. Riko forced Kevin to break his. Renee broke hers in the gang. Allison broke hers to piss off her parents and the "I chose this one" thing. Seth broke his because he wasn't gonna let a clock decide his life.

a new kind of grace by starfleetbanana (T | 1,997 | 1/1)

'“You got it wrong, Josten. She keeps me on a leash” She said and left Neil to his own very dramatic and tragic existence.

Allison was fearless and, even though Renee had a soft spot for her foxes, she was deadly and sharp-edged. They fit together like a Swiss knife next to a gun'.

Soulmates AU where they see in black and white until they meet their soulmates and stop seeing colours when they die.

we're here to see the colour grey bystarfleetbanana (E | 2,143 | 1/1)

Neil had grown up sure he was the kind of person who’d never get to see in colour. There were people who spent their entire lives without knowing what colour was like, and he’d already accepted a life on the run wouldn’t give him a chance to even figure out who had made his entire world change.

Soulmates AU where they see in black and white until they meet their soulmates and stop seeing colour when their soulmates die.

when the world turns grey bystarfleetbanana (G | 1,972 | 1/1)

Allison had never seen colour in her life until she'd stepped into the Foxhole Court. But then Seth Gordon died. He’d died and she’d kept dancing in the middle of the dance floor with one of his friends while the colourful lights swirled around them. She’d drunk a blue cocktail and smeared her dark red lipstick on a napkin.

Soulmate AU where they see in black and white until they meet their soulmates and stop when their soulmates die.

with the lights on by starfleetbanana (T | 1,801 | 1/1)

'Medical professionals classify hysterical blindness as “conversion disorder,” a condition that causes you to show psychological stress in a physical manner. While there are many causes of this disorder, most of them point to some type of anxiety or other psychological trauma that triggers this temporary blindness'

'When the haze went away he tried to focus his vision on something more familiar. Everything that surrounded him was a deep shade of black that threatened to swallow him up, and it didn’t take him long to notice he was at Castle Evermore.'

Part of the Soulmates AU where you see in black and white until you meet your soulmate and stop seeing colours when they die.

your crown of thorns holds roses by quensty (T | 4,444 | 1/1)

Three days after he signs his death sentence to Palmetto State, five after Andrew Minyard sends him flying breathless to the ground, Neil's gaze snaps to the locker room mirror and stares, frozen, at the word threat scrawled along his spinal cord in terrifying, heavy bold.

All in all, he isn’t thrilled about the situation this puts him in, but, based off the negative connotation, it isn’t one-sided either. On the bright side, at least this means his soulmate doesn’t harbor any grandeur delusions about him.

Like fields of poppies by A_Nobelmonster (M | 3,340 | 1/1)

Soul mate au . Andrew has always had more dark soul marks than most adults see in their life. He's used to it. Used to a life based on survival . And then he turns fifteen, a red dot appears. the color of a romantic soul mate. Suddenly the thought of living for the person that gave him his mark is the only thing keeping him alive. Just one chance to know the poor fucker meant for him. As usual It's more than he bargains for.

/Rape/Non-Con /Underage /Self-Harm

To die by your side would be such a heavenly way to go by A_Nobelmonster (T | 494 | 1/1)

Short drabble about the beautiful pain of a fictional person made real by his friends love.

/Major Character Death

The Story of My (Loveless) Life byconstellationsofsentences (G | 3,281 | 4/4)

If there's one thing Jean hates more than Riko and the rest of the Ravens, it's his soulmate and their inability to listen to anything but Taylor Swift. Jean thinks his head's going to explode.

starring Jeremy and his basic white girl music.

when the lights go out by flybbfly (T | 1,705 | 1/1)

Neil wakes up gasping in a bed next to Andrew, unsure if in this lifetime they love or hate each other, are meant to murder or save, and Andrew rolls over and presses closer to Neil in his sleep. His armbands, some form of them omnipresent in every lifetime, are poking out from beneath a pillow.

one of many by Saul (T | 2,859 | 1/1)

They first meet in their dreams.

It isn't as miraculous or smooth a transition as the How To Be Fated: A Guide on Soulmates made it out to be.

The mirrors of our skin. by IceBreeze (T | 862 | 1/1)

When night falls, they remind themselves of who they are.

Ask the Messenger by Metis_Ink (T | 32,614 | 5/5)

Jeremy Knox and the soulmate.

Guest starring: Exy, a transfer student, generalized anxiety, older sisters, drunk lesbians, bread, cake, a shed, the beach, the absence of Hennessy, Star Wars, Renee Walker, self-taught smooth talking, gratuitous French, No. 1 Trojans fan Kevin Day, relationship drama, general drama, the power of Friendship, questions, answers, team spirit!, and, of course, romance.

Bleed for you. by IceBreeze (T | 860 | 1/1)

When you meet your soulmate, you get a nosebleed. It makes every meeting messy and leaves little room for subtlety. 

in this world, there's no such thing as soulmates by kwritten for growlery (G | 801 | 1/1)

for the prompt: what disasters we live

Now I'm Covered in the Colors by alaynes (T | 9,752 | 6/6)

Nathaniel Wesninski is six years old when his first soulmate mark comes in. 

A name was just a name until you said it by maeusetod (Not Rated | 5,106 | 1/1)

Andrew Minyard did not believe in fate, but for a moment it seemed fate did believe in him.

Colours by Q_Jem_Bee (T | 2685 | 1/1)

Colours were splashed across your skin at another being's touch: They were the colour of your soul.Neil's was blue, but no one knew that. No one was going to know.

Careful Hands by fairietailed ( M | 13,797 | 4/4)

“You’ll probably never meet them,” his mother said one day at a diner in Texas. It caught him off guard.

“What?”

“You’ll probably never meet them,” she repeated, nodding in the direction of the lilac bruise splashed across his forearm. “Your soulmate. You’ll most likely never live that long.”

“I know,” he said, and hoped that she believed him.

–

In which bruises and scars from your soulmate appear on your skin, and both Neil and Andrew paint each other like a canvas.

/Violence

Crystal Clear by exactly13percent (superagentwolf) ( T | 3,114 | 1/1)

Your crystal is your heart and soul, manifested. You must keep it safe. Neil and Andrew don’t have typical crystals. For one, they aren’t whole. They’re little pieces, broken by years of wrong. But Kevin’s magic shop brings them together, and they figure maybe broken doesn’t mean destroyed.

Marked by justdk ( T | 2,488 | 1/1)

Neil Josten does not believe in soulmates

Empty Kiss (Filling the Void Remix) by Dancyon ( T | 1,604 | 1/1)

Neil sometimes wonders where it all went wrong. (In the quiet spaces between his breath and Andrew’s, he already knows.)

Soulmate au where Neil should really know better.

/Violence

Life After the Fire (The “Like Fields of Poppies” Remix) by Leahelisabeth (fortheloveofcamelot) for A_Nobelmonster ( T | 2,542 | 1/1)

very first touch leaves a mark, a colour on another’s skin, marks of love or hate, family or anger, friendship or lust. Neil is the boy without colours on his skin, with scars instead of marks. All he wants is to leave his mark, to be real, to be remembered.

/Violence

written in the stars by cloudtalking ( T | 2,095 | 1/1)

this is the boy that turned andrew’s world from night to day. the boy that turned shades of gray to blinding colors, and never seemed to notice nor care.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MAX!!!!

paint my skin in painful truths by Dancyon ( Not Rated | 1,115 | 1/1)

a world where every time someone touches you, they leave a tiny tattoo that represents you and them and your future. Neil doesn’t remember a lot of good touches, and he doesn’t have a lot of happy tattoos, but with Andrew by his side he thinks he might like himself a little bit more.

This is mostly fluff with some angst, because this is still me.

Black and White until Tonight by booksareourlove for queenofseventeen ( T | 508 | 1/1)

His mother told him colours weren’t real. His mother told him she had never seen the colours of the sky. His mother told him that they were broken. People like them weren’t meant for something as delicate as colours. As soulmates. Colours weren’t real but he would still like to imagine the colours of the sky.

The world is black and white until you meet your soulmate. For some, seeing colour is not like jumping into water, but rather walking through mist until you realise it’s actually raining and your clothes are soaked.

stay as long as you need. by lolainslackss ( T | 2,995 | 1/1)

The soulmate timer counts down to your soulmate’s death. Apparently, Andrew’s soulmate doesn’t have long to live.

in pieces by archieknight ( G | 6,146 | 1/1)

Was it this difficult for everyone, or were they all just so broken that their pieces couldn’t fit the way destiny wanted anymore?

paint my body gold by cave_canem (T | 12,050 | 1/1)

That winter, Jean comes close to his soulmate for the first time in years. He knows this because his side is burning where the mark is branded in his skin. It’s pain unlike anything he’s ever felt: pulsing with his heartbeat and glowing through the skin; almost soft with something like a forgotten childhood memory.

never an empty room by cloudtalking (T | 6,510 | 1/1)

for @kevinyard: a trans neil kandreil soulmate au

soulmate (noun): a person or persons with whom one shares a soul with.

visit (noun): 1. an act of going or coming to see a person or place socially, as a tourist, or for some other purpose. 2. when a soul is stretched thin and snaps closed, causing one to see and be seen by their soulmate

/Graphic Depictions of Violence

A Home, for the Holidays by zen_fox (M | 3,321 | 1/1)

Three Christmases, in the lives of three soulmates.

good game by unrain (T | 1,996 | 1/1)

I don’t like you, but I can’t deny that your shot was a game winner sprawls around Kevin’s throat.

Neil’s words are a fucking joke in comparison. It’s not quite the death sentence that is a simple hi or a hello—which is a soulmark that’s kind of pathetically tragic to have in this day and age, because it just makes everything a trillion times more difficult and is basically the equivalent of your soulmate kissing you goodbye and saying see you never. But Neil’s words are pretty damn close to being that pathetically tragic. If only his soulmate wasn’t so unimaginative and dull.

Speak easy to me by The_time_it_takes (Not Rated | 3,370 | 1/1)

between hoping and believing by cryptidkidprem (T | 47,332 | 16/16)

Jean convinced himself a long time ago that he doesn't have a soulmate. Or maybe he just wants to believe that. Things would be easier if he was destined to be alone. It will at least hurt less when he inevitably winds up that way anyway.

And then there's Jeremy, who's been dreaming of meeting his match for years. For some reason, Jeremy seems determined to convince Jean that sometimes he might actually be able to have the things he hopes for, and that soulmate or no, Jean Moreau has people who will stick with him.

You're a flashlight in a dark room by trubenblack (Not Rated | 1,712 | 1/1)

The foxes in a world where everyone has their soulmates name written on them in their soulmates handwriting and the stories of how each of them dealt with them.

[marksleepy]

wish upon a scintilla of hope

word count: 4849 worth of fluff and idk like 5% of chensung because they’re such cute best friends a/n: i spent so long on this only @simplyaroha knows. jael i’m so sorry for keeping you waiting LOL. and i want to gift @chenleplanet with this because ryne your love for chenle is unreal and ily <3 i also want to gift @jenoist with this as vivi you’re the nicest and you make me cry jscudnvifjsdb ily2. lastly, gifting you, a reader, with this because i’m thankful that you’re reading this (or going to?). if this is my first fic you’re reading then hello i hope you stay and read my future tales ahaha. if this isn’t the first then hey!! thanks so much for staying. i really appreciate it! merry early christmas everybody. p.s. italicised words are for dream talks and texts in case you get confused

chenle clapping cuz i finally finished this thousand weeks long thing. gif belongs to @nakamotens :) there’s already a watermark on the gif but i’m just doing what’s right

The 11th night of each month—the only night when you don’t dream. Tons of people labour under the misapprehension that they don’t dream every night, but that’s simply because they don’t remember what they were dreaming of.

Tonight, an endless tenebrosity stretches before you.

You think of ‘Hey’, and immediately the word appears in the darkness, faint and in the colour of snow.

There’s no reply. Which sucks as this means you’ll have to spend the next seven hours or so in total nothingness, unless the person at the other end of the country (or world, you don’t know for sure) answers you. It should’ve been somewhere near an hour when a foggy yet enthusiastic ‘Hi!’ comes into view.

Sorry, I was catching up on some homework, it continues.

What time is it? you think instantly.

My phone tells me it was 1:04 am the last time I saw it.

You should start going to bed earlier, loser, you respond.

Communicating with soulmates would’ve been a lot easier if names aren’t eschewed. You’ve tried thinking about the most uncommon names, but they refuse to come to light. This explains why you and your soulmate decided to call each other ‘loser’ on the fourth encounter a few months ago. It’s not the cutest, but it’ll have to do.

Don’t tell me what to do, loser.

Fine. What do YOU want to do?

I don’t know.

You sigh, if that’s even possible at this moment. Do people sigh while dreaming? You assume they do. Tell me more about yourself then. The only thing I know about you is that you’re an annoying boy.

His reply comes a little late. You got the gender right but the adjective wrong. Now let me go to sleep.

You’re already sleeping, dork.

You can almost hear him chuckle. You feel a wistful longing for his voice.

I’m just kidding. What do you want to know about me? His words emerge, a colon and right bracket following close. They join the string of words disappearing above.

The hall is snug after walking in the icy wind outside. The assembly that all students attend religiously will begin in a few minutes. Your eyes dart from one student to another, in search of a boy with lilac hair. But he finds you first.

“I’m right here, Y/N!” Chenle yells, clamping his hands on your shoulders with the largest grin on his face.

“I wasn’t looking for you,” you say, turning around to face him.

His smile seems to get wider if that’s feasible. “Yeah, I believe you.”

You know you’ve lost when a smile threatens to surface.

Every school year starts off with students sitting according to their classes. However, by mid-February (sometimes earlier), the rule is long broken with students scattered everywhere in the hall with their companions from other classes or grades. One clear example is a senior hanging out with a junior, and in this case, Mark and Donghyuck, who are laughing over the funniest joke they’ve ever heard.

“Let’s go look for Jisung,” Chenle says. He clasps your wrist and pushes through the crowd. You feel a strong beat of your heart, something you experience whenever he does that. His touch feels like wearing gloves on a snowy winter day, tucking yourself under a blanket on a cold winter night. You shake your head. You shouldn’t be feeling like this. You can’t be feeling like this. Chenle isn’t your soulmate.

But… It’s okay to prefer someone to your soulmate, right?

You decide that it’s wrong as soon as the question slips. This feeling for Chenle, you convince yourself, is patently temporary. Besides, Chenle doesn’t like you in that way. It’s indubitable.

It also feels extremely strange to enjoy being around someone so much, especially if that someone isn’t who you talk to every 11th night of the month.

Maybe you don’t even like Chenle. So what if you feel accomplished when he laughs heartily at your jokes? So what if your eyes light up every time you see someone with lilac hair on the street (not very often), only to be disappointed when said person wasn’t who you thought it was? So what if you associate love songs with him? So what if your stomach flutters whenever he grabs your hand? So what—

“Y/N? Y/N!” Chenle waves his hand before your face. You blink at him.

“You okay? You seem to be deep in thought,” he continues. He has no idea.

He waves to Jisung. The latter has two empty seats beside him, and he beckons both of you over.

The hall is calmer than before, with most already seated down. Chenle sits between you and Jisung. They start talking about everything imaginable, frequently laughing mid-sentence. Your heart melts at this exuberant duo, and you often catch yourself staring at the older of the pair.

Someone catches you doing so too.

“Somebody’s real busy.”

You snap out of your reverie to see Jisung looking at you knowingly.

Chenle has a look of confusion and embarrassment on his face. “Are we boring you?”

You shake your head just as the principal taps on the microphone twice.

“I’m sorry. I know this isn’t really your thing,” Chenle resumes. At this point, you don’t even know what he’s talking about in the first place.

“It’s okay, Chenle,” you reassure him. “You— Both of you never bore me.”

You spend the next hour listening to the principal drone on about God knows what and stealing glances at a boy with lilac hair and inappropriate laughter.

“What’s your soulmate like?” Chenle asks you from his desk. His highlighter is poised over a page of his science textbook as he waits for a reply.

You look up from your calculus worksheet and eye him sceptically from where you’re sitting on the wooden floor of his bedroom. “That’s new.”

“I’m just curious.”

You turn your attention back to the paper resting on your lap as his question replays in your head. You’re at his house studying for a test, mainly to seek for warmth. It isn’t snowing, but it’s freezing. You’d left your house keys on your desk and aren’t keen to be outdoors making beats with your teeth. Also, no one will be home until dusk.

“He’s nice,” you murmur. “Funny.”

Chenle goes back to highlighting some texts, occasionally writing on Post-it notes. “Do you, uh, like him?”

If you were brave, you would say, “No. I like you.”

But you aren’t, so you say, “I guess.”

Chenle’s tense shoulders sag. He leans his back on the chair, tapping his pen on the edge of his desk.

“What about you? Do you like your soulmate?” you question. You look at the naked trees outside with gnawing uneasiness in your stomach.

“Yeah"—his cheeks redden slightly—"but I…

“Nothing. We’re supposed to be studying.” He pulls his chair closer to the desk and uncaps another highlighter. You want to argue that he’d started talking first but decided against it.

The next time he talks to you is to ask you what you want to have for dinner.

You spend your days taking tests, hanging out with friends, and being muddled by Chenle’s behaviour.

“Did I say something wrong?” You and Jisung are standing outside the soccer field, the question accompanied by your foggy breath tumbling out your mouth before you can stop it. Jisung stops observing the senior practising his kicks and turns his head to look at you.

“What?”

“It’s nothing. Chenle’s just being strange.”

Jisung clears his throat. “He is?”

You spot Chenle running wildly on the field, engaged in a friendly match with some sophomores.

“Not now. But when we’re alone he becomes awkward.”

“Maybe he, I don’t know, likes you?” Jisung pushes his bangs out of his face. “How’s alone time with him?”

You look down at the ground, fingers gripping the fence, face pink from the cold and something else. “Don’t phrase it that way.”

“Here comes lover boy.”

You grimace at his words. Chenle skips towards you and Jisung, his hair sticking to his forehead and shirt soaked in sweat despite the numbing temperature. Jisung wraps a towel around the older and helps him put on his coat. “That was fun. Thanks for waiting for me.”

Chenle reaches for your hand and freezes at once.

Jisung doesn’t seem to notice anything. He takes off first, shoving his hands in his winter coat. “Remind me to hit you when I can feel my hands again.”

Chenle chuckles, and you can’t say you relate to Jisung. It feels like you’re touching hot coal.

Chenle once told you receiving coals for Christmas wasn’t bad at all. “Just burn them and roast marshmallows.”

You had watched the fire flicker through his eyes.

Chenle’s hair is dyed a hazelnut brown colour when you see him in school. It’s as if your lungs are caught in a mesh and entangled. The air feels thick and suffocating.

“What do you think?” is the first thing he says when your eyes meet.

You force yourself to breathe. “What happened to lilac hair? That was such a look, man.”

“I got tired of people giving me weird looks.”

And why would people do that? You can’t understand why a change of his hair colour has this big of an effect on you.

You shrug, trying to look nonchalant. “It looks good on you.”

You nearly miss the way his face reddens as he looks down at his dirty Converse.

“Y/N…

Y/N.

Y/N!”

“What do you want, Chenle?”

“Look at me.”

He raises his right hand up to your left cheek and draws comforting, tingly circles with his thumb. Then he’s leaning in, closer. He looks at you through half-closed lids before coming closer. Closer.

“Y/N. I…”

You feel your heart throbbing loudly in your ears, like drums beating on the street during festivals.

You don’t feel anything on your lips. But your eyes stay closed.

“Y/N.”

You love hearing your name roll so effortlessly off his tongue. You love it. You love him.

“Y/N. I—”

“You what?”

“I swear if you don’t get up right now I’ll really kill you!”

You shoot up from your laying position, your hair a mess and your eyes swollen with sleep. Jisung stands at the foot of your bed, his hands on his hips as he lours at you.

“What are you doing in my room?” you ask, groggy.

“Are you serious?”

You free your legs from your woollen blanket and shudder when your feet touch the gelid floor.

“We were supposed to study at Chenle’s, remember?” Jisung sighs. “Clearly not.”

You give him a bashful smile, eyeing the bedroom doorway.

Jisung taps his foot impatiently. “He isn’t here. He’s helping his mum with groceries.”

“I wasn't—”

“Just get ready and meet us at his place, Y/N.” He gives you one last look before disappearing down the hallway. “Your face is red. Do you want me to open the windows?”

“I thought you were joking!” You uncap the half-filled bottle then cap it after a second. “Who associates Jisung with textbooks and homework?”

Jisung throws a tiny ball of paper at you. “Judgemental. I do study.”

“Stop it, you two,” Chenle chuckles. “Let’s actually get stuff done. We can also ask Y/N since she’s the smartest one here.”

“She is?” Jisung snorts. He earns a punch on the arm from you while your face glows with embarrassment.

So the three of you study. Chenle and Jisung have tests on different subjects this week but you don’t. You work on your assignment, which is a research on a historical building. Apart from occasional questions from the duo, the room is otherwise quiet. It’s slowly getting dark, the sun dipping below the horizon.

You look at Chenle discreetly. His eyelids are pink from him rubbing them. He looks cute when he’s serious and focused. There’s a knock on the door before Chenle’s mum pops her head into the room and smiles. “Dinner’s ready if any of you are hungry. Don’t overwork yourselves, alright?”

There are hums and nods, then the room is quiet again. It can’t have been more than five minutes when Jisung says, “Guys! It’s snowing!”

Turns out there are only little specks of snow, much to everyone’s (Jisung’s) disappointment. With the assignment and scrawled notes forgotten in Chenle’s bedroom, you and the pair stand outside just in case white flakes fall again, wriggling about to stay warm.

“This is annoying,” Jisung groans.

Chenle nudges him playfully. “There are a lot more days to come, Jisung.”

Jisung merely shrugs and says he’s hungry. Everyone trudges back into the house, relieved to soak in its warmth.

It’s late when Jisung leaves Chenle’s house, which is starting to slowly lose its heat. The sky is an inky black but there are no visible stars due to the light-polluted city that Chenle lives in. You sit on his cabin bed, head tilted towards the night sky, watching a scintilla in the midst of the darkness.

Your eyes drift to Chenle. He yawns and rubs his eyes for the nth time.

“Hey,” you say softly. “Take a break.”

He stifles another yawn, pushes his arms in the air and stretches. “My mum will murder me if I fail this class again.”

“She did tell us not to overwork ourselves.”

His smile appears. He pushes his chair back and ambles towards the bed to sit beside you. “What are you doing?” He bumps his shoulder against yours.

You point to the tiny spark in the sky.

“Ooh,” he gushes. “Let’s make a wish.”

“That’s not a shooting star, Chenle.”

“That’s fine. I made a wish at camp last year when I thought I saw one. Until I realised it was Renjun throwing a piece of trash across the campsite.”

One end of Chenle’s lips is lifted, and soon both of you are collapsing into gales of laughter.

“What did you wish for?” Chenle asks.

You shake your head, grinning. “Secret.”

It’s the 11th night of the month again. You go to bed quite early, feeling completely knackered from interminable assignments. You wait and wait, looking at lyrics of your favourite song arise as you think of it.

This soulmate of yours sure sleeps late.

All of a sudden, a Hey pops up.

Hi, you reply in your head.

Sorry, I forgot that it’s the 11th.

I have a question.

What is it?

You pause, letting the words disappear as they go higher. You think of your question. Do you like anybody?

Yeah.

He awaits what you have for him next.

Then, have you confessed to that person?

No. I’m too scared to do that.

How do you cope?

Uh, I have a blog where I write what I want to say to her. Yeah, it’s cheesy so go ahead and laugh at me.

You feel yourself smiling. No it’s not. It’s cute.

I can show you it if you want. No one knows about it except for my best friend, only because I foolishly left the page open while I went to the bathroom. That’s how embarrassed I feel about it. But now you know.

I’m honoured.

The website and username he uses show up in a minute. You know the website well, however, he has an odd username—practically like everyone on this planet. It reminds you of Chenle with his strange usernames for all eight of his accounts.

“Why 'dirtykitchenfloor’?” you had choked out. “'terrifyingpickle’. I’m leaving.”

Chenle had grabbed your hand, all but laughing. “Don’t. I have six more.”

You there? These two words knock you back to the blackness.

Yeah. I was thinking about some stuff.

Like the person you like?

What? No. Thanks for reminding me though, I’ll go think about him now.

HAHAHA—pause—well have fun. I’ll be here, roaming.

You imagine the lilac-now-hazelnut hair boy standing beside you outside in the snowy city. The street lamp winks as snow starts to pile up atop and around it. His hair is sprinkled with stardust and snowflakes. His eyes twinkle and his hand feels like a cup of hot chocolate. The fallen snow feels soft beneath your shoes.

Everything feels right.

“I think I’m in love,” Jisung says dreamily.

It’s a frosty afternoon, and you find yourself again with Jisung and Chenle, everyone either sprawled on Jisung’s bed or floor. Drinks and bags of snacks litter the ground. No one pays attention to them.

A weird noise escapes Chenle’s mouth. “With who?”

“My soulmate.”

You snigger and say, “They’re called soulmates for a reason.” You then remember that Chenle isn’t yours. You also don’t know if it’s bad that your soulmate likes someone else. You figure it isn’t, knowing you’re not breaking any hearts around here and you like someone else too.

Jisung prattles on about his soulmate. You nod blankly, and catch Chenle gazing at you. He points to Jisung covertly before shaking his head and rolling his eyes. There’s a beam on your face.

“You aren’t even listening to me,” Jisung groans. “Stop flirting with each other.”

“At least I have someone to flirt with,” Chenle sneers.

A thick shade of red mantles your cheeks. “S-stop talking nonsense.”

Chenle looks at you the way a child would look when he’s caught going through presents on the night before Christmas. A reddish hue branches out across his fair complexion.

Jisung’s frown steadily turns into a soft knowing smile. “Since I’m done talking about my amazing love life, it’s your turn. The smarter person starts first.”

The branch tapping on the windows is the only thing disturbing Jisung’s hushed bedroom. You wonder why he hasn’t gotten rid of it. You’d find it difficult to fall asleep on a blustery night.

“So none of you are smart? Not a surprise to me, I guess,” Jisung teases.

“My soulmate has a blog where he writes what he wants to say to the person he likes down,” you begin, ignoring Jisung’s raillery.

Jisung lets out an impressed-sounding “huh” the same time Chenle says, “That’s stupid.”

A grim line forms on your mouth as you stare at him. “I don’t think it is.”

"Really?” Chenle coughs deliberately. “That seems so cowardly.” Jisung cocks his head a little to the right twice out of habit, a small smile playing on his lips as he watches the exchange between you and Chenle. “I think it’s stupid too,” the younger of the pair blurts out.

Chenle glares at Jisung. “No, it’s not.”

“You said it was! I’m just agreeing with you.”

“I’m just… just agreeing with Y/N.”

You snicker as they start to banter. They stop and stare at you, and soon the room is filled with three friends who are attacked by uncontrollable laughter.

Jisung wipes at his eyes and after he’s calmed down, he says, “I wanna love like Y/N’s soulmate.”

“Me too,” Chenle says, albeit having a faraway look in his eyes.

“Don’t you already?”

“Sh-shut up!”

“Sh-shut up!” Jisung mimics. Chenle simply gets up and flicks Jisung’s forehead. He whines in pain and flicks the former back. You sit up on the spot on Jisung’s bed and smile.

Happy. Happy is what you feel.

You don’t know how you or Chenle do it, but it’s three in the morning when you finally shut your laptop and let out a wavering cry. “I’m done. Spent.”

“Let’s get some sleep.” Chenle yawns, lumbering to his bed and pulling the sheets over his entire body.

“Throw me a pillow and blanket.”

“What?” Chenle peers at you. “You’re not sleeping on the floor. It’s not carpeted and it’s freezing.”

“I’ll be fine, worrywart.”

“Who even says that?” He gives you a blue pillow dotted with white clouds and a soft blanket. “You wanna swap spots instead?”

“Go to sleep, Chenle.” You tuck yourself under the blanket, which comes with his scent and a hint of flowery laundry detergent. With heavy and teary eyes from yawning too much, you lie facing the ceiling, the floor a tad cold for comfort. Your mind threatens to drag you to sleep, until a weak voice breaks the silence of the night.

“Are you asleep?”

“Yes,” you mumble, your eyes shut, hardly able to contemplate what you’re saying.

He laughs lightly. “I can’t sleep. Talk to me.”

“Nice.”

“Y/N.”

“Chenle,” you mutter, pulling the blanket up till it covers your chin.

“Cat.”

“Dolphin.”

Right now you’re starting to wake up. You lie on your side and prop the side of your head in your palm, facing him. He mirrors your position.

“I actually hate you,” you quip.

“No you don’t.”

“Right for once.”

He closes his eyes, his head drooping. You study his soft features, feeling your eyes beginning to close again. Your head hits the pillow and you pull the blanket over your shoulder. Your teeth chatter slightly, but that’s okay—you’re too tired to care anyway.

You wake up when the sky is still black and starless. Chenle’s scent seems to have gotten stronger. You sit up, using your elbows as support, only to see the bed empty and rumpled. Something breathes against your arm, and you almost smack yourself from pulling back too fast.

There you see Chenle curled up beside you on the ground like a foetus. His blanket is thrown over you, but it’s riding off his body, his tummy exposed to the cold. You remove his blanket from yourself and cover him up to the neck. He stirs but stays asleep, sighing with satisfaction.

“You’re an odd one,” you whisper in the unlit room. “I don’t mind it one bit.”

You mirror his position this time, dreams taking you on different adventures—all of them with this boy who makes you feel warmer this winter.

“You chose to sleep on the floor when you have a bed,” you say between munches of your cereal the next morning.

“I didn’t choose.” Chenle dips his bread in your bowl of milk. “I fell off the bed.”

“Ha ha. Remind me to laugh again later.”

Tap tap.

Jisung stands at the door. Chenle opens it to reveal him clad in a sweater, coat and fuzzy pants with matching shoes.

“Pfft, what are you wearing?” you joke. You spoon some cereal into your mouth.

“Yes good morning and thanks for inviting me to the sleepover,” Jisung says, throwing his bag on the floor and plopping himself down on the high stool opposite you.

Chenle returns to the stool to your left. He pulls his bread apart and waves a piece at Jisung. “You turned us down!”

“Oh right. Because you two are boring.”

“And somehow you like hanging out with us?” you say with amusement.

“Whatever,” Jisung says. “So… are the two of you a thing now?”

Chenle splutters on his juice, orange liquid flying out his mouth. You feel the heat on your face even though the cold air that followed Jisung in is still lingering in the kitchen.

“Are you okay?” Jisung laughs, slapping him on the back.

You rub your temples. “It’s too early for this.”

“I thought you talked things through last night.”

“Just shut up, Jisung. Eat your cereal,” Chenle rebukes. He hops off the stool to go wash his mouth at the sink. Jisung shakes his head in disappointment.

can you come out now? reads Chenle’s text at 12 in the morning.

You compose a new message. I don’t plan on getting murdered by either one of my parents tonight

please

omg fine. why are you here so late

i just wanted to see you

Your heart leaps in your chest. ok chenle.

You drape your woollen blanket around you and lift your window up, feeling like those furtive teenagers in movies. An icy gust of wind slaps your cheeks, but the coldness dissipates when you see Chenle stomping on the crunchy ice on the gravel path outside, his hands shoved deep into his coat pocket.

“You okay?” you say after jumping from your window sill (cautiously).

“Can I ask you a question?” he says with foggy breath.

“Yeah. I mean we’re already here.”

He closes his eyes and gulps. “Can I kiss you?”

“Chenle…”

He blocks your view by putting his hand before your eyes. “Don’t look at me. I’m embarrassed.”

You grab his arm with your shaky one and pull him towards you. He’s so close your cloudy breaths mingle. It’s a test to see who makes the first move.

He does.

And your lips feel like it’s on fire.

He really is an odd one, but you don’t mind it one bit.

You fall asleep with pink cheeks that night and the feeling of Chenle’s hand at the back of your neck, spreading warmth throughout your body.

Hey loser. I kissed him. You’re starting off bold tonight. You couldn’t care less.

In a split second, your reply comes. Really?

Yes, really.

How was it?

It was… I don’t know.

Like you were going to melt? Like you were floating with the clouds?

Yes. Very much.

I felt like that too.

You think of the winter spice jelly sitting in the fridge, knowing completely how it feels. Because you’re just as stiff as it is.

You refuse to analyse the words. Ohh, you kissed her too?

I did. I went to her house 30 minutes before it turned 12. Stood outside considering if I should just go home and keep my feelings bottled up forever, or put our friendship at risk by doing it.

You feel like tearing up. I think you did the right thing.

Me too.

You search for the hazelnut hair boy in the crowded hall. It’s been tougher as almost everyone has that same hair colour. Mark and Donghyuck are chaffing each other; a group of juniors—Renjun, Jeno and Jaemin—enters the hall, chatting incessantly. Pretty much a common sight to see.

A hand rests on your shoulder from behind.

“I know I know,” Chenle grins. “You weren’t looking for me.”

“You knew?” you ask. Both of you move to a less packed area.

He nods. “But it was after I told you about the blog.”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“I thought you were smart enough to figure it out.”

You scoff, but a smile forces its way onto your face.

“I guess I’m smarter than you in some way,” he adds, punching you lightly on the biceps.

“Guys!” Jisung bounces towards you and Chenle. He eyes you suspiciously, before moving his attention to Chenle. “So… Are you two a thing now?”

You exchange glances with Chenle.

“Shut up, Jisung.”

Jisung doesn’t get an actual answer, but you’re sure he knows when he laughs with you and Chenle.

“I can’t believe you have a blog filled with your feelings about me,” you tease. “How cheesy.”

“Can we not talk about that now?” Chenle groans, covering his face with his hands. “You said it was cute.”

“It is.”

“I’ll just delete it later and stop liking you.”

You reach for his hands, fisting and trapping them in your palms. “No. I need to read it when you start losing feelings for me.”

“Then I guess you won’t be reading it at all.”

You and Chenle walk under the jet black sky side by side, enjoying the wind’s whispers. His tickles your palm with his pinky and says, “I have more stuff I want to say to you.”

“Go ahead.”

“You’ll have to wait for the 11th.”

You realise your wish came true even before you made it.

a/n: hey!! you made it to the end! for this i want to say thank you once again and i hope you enjoyed this. low-key found the part where renjun threw trash across the campsite funny LOL

[bluesrrgents]

Hi dear!! So sorry to bother you (again because i've asked you for fic recs before and they WERE amazing so im back aha) but would hav any good jerejean fic recs?? Ive become kinda obsessed with them

hii you’re never a bother!! sorry this took so long i lost my list of jerejean fics that i’ve read r i p zoe! they’re all under the cut and * means i haven’t read it yet, and please make sure to look at the warnings if you have any triggers!! have fun reading:)

thanks again to everyone who offered me some more recs :)

*hair dye by profslupin

Renee convinces Jean to let her dye his hair. The rest is exactly what you’d expect. (2k)

*mirrors by profslupin

The Trojans help Jean learn to look in the mirror and see himself instead of his scars

“Jean had a complicated relationship with his appearance. It wasn’t that he was insecure about his flaws, necessarily, but rather that they reminded him of his time in the Nest. Of his time with him.” (2.6k)

*watermarked by fairietailed

He hops into the kitchen on one foot, catching his mother before she carries the bowl of peas she’s holding into the dining room.

“Jeremy?” Her eyebrows pull together in concern at the look on his face. “What is it?”

“I don’t know,” he says, sticking out his foot. “I think it’s my soul mate?”

–

In which bruises and scars from your soulmate appear on your skin, and Jeremy’s skin is a myriad of colored stains. (4.6k)

*and i wanna come home to you. by redhoods

He’s so absorbed in staring at the way the sleeves are pulled up around his wrists that he doesn’t realize the team has filed out to the locker rooms until Jeremy crouches into his line of sight, “Everything alright?”

No, he thinks desperately, you’re too much.

“Sure,” he says eventually, standing up and walking away.

this is actually two parts, so it’s about 6k total

*the smell of honey by lilaliacs

Martha’s was a cozy little coffee shop that always smelled of honey, lilacs and something that couldn’t be described as anything less than home.And that’s what it was to Jeremy, who had spent his childhood sat on a stool at the tiny bar, coloring in the patterns of the menus, or watching his mother creating the most beautiful cakes and pastries that he had ever seen.

The place was filled with good memories and everyone who came in could sense the atmosphere of peace that seemed to fill the soft light falling in through lacy curtains at any time of day. In fact, multiple patrons had stated that they came in for exactly this, for a break from their everyday stress, to just grab a coffee and absorb whatever magic the smell of Martha’s cakes emitted and it was something Jeremy’s mother was very proud of.It was also something Jeremy was very proud of, and the reason for him to put his all in making the customers’ time there worthwhile.He never thought that one day, doing that would be a challenge.

(AU in which everything is the same only that Jeremy isnt captain of the trojans but works in his mom’s coffeeshop instead) (11k)

*eyes wide open by jaylocked

Jean blinked. Blinked again. Was sure he didn’t recognize the man on his doorstep, with his bright eyes and enormous grin and wavy blonde hair. Waited for him to explain himself with a simple raised eyebrow.

“Hi!” the man finally chirped. The sound was happiness channeled into a single word, and Jean wasn’t sure how he didn’t hate him already.

(based on the prompt from tumblr: “hi sorry I live below you and I hear your dog running around and barking all the time and– no no it’s fine I was just wondering if I could pet it?” au) (13k)

*i’ll come crashing by exyfexyfoxes

Hades/Persephone in the modern world where Jean runs an underground club that herds the souls of the dead. It’s a place where even gods die if they stay too long, regardless of how many pomegranate seeds they eat. Jean wants out. Jeremy wants in. Everybody wants them far away from each other. (19k)

*je reviens by laarusthefirst

‘Moreau is a rain cloud,’ Alvarez muttered, annoyed and bruised, watching Jean stalk ahead to the changing rooms. ‘He’s the human embodiment of a headache. He is the opposite of a Trojan.’‘Fucking good though, isn’t he?’ grinned Connor, jogging past.‘Can’t we all just be nice?’ Jeremy asked. (20k)

*this ink is still drying by ghostqueen

You can’t control who you want and you can’t control who hurts you

Jeremy was staring at Jean’s arms, tracing the bright swirls and splotches of ink that made up his sleeves with his eyes. His sleeves had been months of work and they still weren’t quite complete, he was still figuring out how to finish them. The first tattoo on his arms had been eight months ago, his first tattoo had been long before that. (26k)

*thick skin, an elastic heart by badacts

Jean sleeps around and learns how to make friends rather than alliances. Jeremy falls in love and can’t stop fucking up. (26k)

*ask the messenger by metis_ink

Jeremy Knox and the soulmate.

Guest starring: Exy, a transfer student, generalized anxiety, older sisters, drunk lesbians, bread, cake, a shed, the beach, the absence of Hennessy, Star Wars, Renee Walker, self-taught smooth talking, gratuitous French, No. 1 Trojans fan Kevin Day, relationship drama, general drama, the power of Friendship, questions, answers, team spirit!, and, of course, romance. (32k)

he could taste the stars by subtlehysteria

Jean is still adjusting to being a Trojan, Jeremy tries to help Jean open up to his new team. (47k)

*shield for a heart by neilskey

“It’s your choice, but you’re rotting away in here, Jean and no matter what she says, you can’t live in Abby’s spare bedroom forever. Time to start fighting again.”

Kevin’s hard and commanding tone was no surprise. The softness had been beaten out of him around the same time as Jean.

“What if I don’t want to anymore?”

Maybe it was because he had been half hidden in shadows-Jean had kept the shades drawn, but light still seeped in the cracks- but Jean thought he had seen something akin to understanding paint Kevin’s cool expression.“He’s gone. You survived. Play or don’t, it’s up to you, but you need to get out of this fucking house.”//Jean’s first year at USC. Jeremy falls hard, Jean comes around eventually. (55k)

*a little illumination by lazarusthefirst

Jean’s a lonely firefighter, and Jeremy teaches kindergarten. Everyone learns something about themselves. (56k)

*shooting for the stars, desperately reaching for something in the dark by cryptidkidprem

“He just won’t be back in black.”

A look at Jean’s first year with the Trojans, and his slightly rocky path to recovery. (146k)

WIPs:

*these streets by profslupin

alternate title: Jean and Jeremy’s Guide to an Epic Cross Country Road Trip

After one of Alvarez’s pranks leaves the boys stranded in South Carolina after a game, they decide to take the long route home. (1.6k, chapters 1/?)

*under the sun by knox_moreau

Jean Moreau is an exy player, not a writer. At least that’s what he thinks. His newfound therapist, however, has other ideas. Seeing as Jean refuses to talk to her in his hour-long therapy sessions, Ms. Dawson suggests perhaps writing down whatever he’s keeping inside. Jean can’t possibly see how he’s expected to write when he has nothing to write about. Then comes Jeremy Knox, in all his brightness and magnitude. Maybe, Jean thinks, he has something to write about. (7.2k, ch. 5/?)

*daffodils & gardenias by profslupin (any and all works by meg sponsored by this blog)

Jeremy Knox is the owner of a tattoo parlor when Jean Moreau opens up a flower shop next door. Jeremy gets a crush, but thankfully Laila and Alvarez are there to play matchmaker, with the help of Renee. (14k, ch. 9/?)\

*leaving marks by blackcatiiix

In a world where your soulmate’s injuries appear as bruises on your skin, Jeremy is… struggling. And that’s even before he meets Jean Moreau. (46k, ch. 12/?)

*marrow without bone by exyfexyfoxes

Onscreen Jeremy didn’t hesitate, displaying an eagerness that translated well across television. “Yeah, I spoke to Jean earlier this week. He’s definitely done for the year but he’ll be back in the fall.”Then, impeccably, a twitch at the corner of his mouth. “He just won’t be back in black.“Jean’s eyes narrowed.

(The season hasn’t even started yet and Jeremy already wants to cut their newest player from the team. Making the switch from Raven to Trojan isn’t quite what Jean thought it would be.) (68k, ch. 18/20)

[alettertotheuniverse-blog1]

Thailand: Places

My next trip won’t be for another week and I’m too excited, so I’ll distract myself by writing a proper Thailand post since I’ve been feeling TH-nostalgic lately.

Also, I’ve been putting off writing about it for months so it’s probably just right to stop procrastinating and check this off my to-do list before the year ends.

The last time I wrote about the land of Cha Yen, I actually was still IN Thailand - running around for about two weeks and still had a few places left to visit. But that was more of a personal blog entry.

So... here are the places in Thailand I’d love to see again:  A more concise post.

The photos aren’t as high-res as my more recent posts as this trip was months ago, but please bear with it, thanks.

Passport Bookshop

It’s a cute, dainty, silent cafe along Khao San Rd. This road is famously known as home of the backpackers since this is where you’ll find a lot of cheap hostels and bars. Amidst the loud noise of Khao San, Passport Bookshop serves as an introvert’s oasis. Here, you’ll find an assortment of coffee and tea (they have a shelf-full), books (both foreign and local), journals, and the most-artsy-yet-affordable postcards (around 5-20 baht / 7-25 php).

Monkey Temple (Phra Prang Sam Yot), Lopburi

Lopburi is a small town, 2-3 hours away from Bangkok. Here, is where you can find the famous and bad-ass monkeys of Phra Prang Sam Yot.

The monkeys don’t just live at the temple though, they roam around the whole town so be mindful of your belongings. There’s also a museum showcasing the town’s history nearby, so check that out if you are into it.

Entrace to the temple is around 30-50 baht for tourists and around 10-15 baht for locals. I looked really Thai (hahahaha for real), and came with Thai friends and was only asked to pay the local price. So, come with your Thai friends if you could.

Ayutthaya

If you’ve ever played Ragnarok, you probably know that the places were based from real life.  Ayothaya in Ragnarok was actually based from this place. 

I don’t know what it is, there’s just an air of the past in this place. The ruins, the floating market, elephants... it just feels like I’m back in time somehow. I had a really peaceful afternoon spent here shopping around through a boat ride.

I know that one of the reasons why Ayutthaya is visited by tourists is because of the elephants. But, I don’t know. I couldn’t get myself to ride one. Taking a photo already made me feel extremely guilty. So... I feel like if you’d like to see elephants, visit an elephant sanctuary instead. Don’t worry, there are lots of those, mostly in Chiang Rai.

Chiang Rai

Chiang Rai is an hour (or two) away from Chiang Mai and is high above the mountains. I went to this town to visit the three famous temples representing Heaven, Earth, and the Underworld (it’s probably representing something more profound than that but that’s how I understood it with my limited knowledge of Thailand’s culture and religion.)

1. Wat Rong Kun (The White Temple)

This temple used to be in such bad shape due to being underfunded, but a local visual artist, Chalermchai Kositpipat, decided to rebuild the place so the Wat Rong Kun at present is actually his vision.

There’s a museum as well housing Chalermchai Kositpipat’s masterpieces. That small museum is also something else! I think, to be honest, I enjoyed that as much as I enjoyed looking at the actual temple. This guy is a genius, in my opinion, and I’m bummed that I can’t show you what was displayed inside as taking photos is strictly prohibited. But I bought so many postcards because they were of his paintings!!!

2. Wat Rong Suea Ten (The Blue Temple)

This one was still under renovation when I visited but it was like visiting Buddha in his underwater kingdom. This was built by a student of Mr. Chalermchai Kositpipat (the guy I was raving about earlier). I feel so bad that I don’t know his name. I will try to Google it and update this afterwards.

3. Baan Dam (The Black House)

It’s an art gallery of Thawan Duchanee - the visual artist who designed and opened the place to the public. I don’t think anyone really considers it as a temple. It houses odd, medieval, and viking-like artworks, furniture, and houses.

They also have dance and music performances showcasing Chiang Rai’s traditions and folklore. And a souvenir shop where you can buy preserved insects and penis key chains, in case you were looking for those. Yep. 

4. Choui Fong Tea Plantation

Matcha lovers, rejoice. If you are into all things tea, why not go to a tea house overlooking the plantation where those tea leaves were harvested? 

Choui Fong Tea Plantation is high above the mountains and it may be best to rent a motorbike (which will also give you a thrill going through the mountain slopes). You can buy lots of tea-related products to bring back home and chill at the tea house. 

4.5 Cat ‘n a Cup Cafe

I mean.. I know we have loads of cat cafes here in the PH, but since you’re already in Chiang Rai, check this place out to relax. Because, duh, kitties.

Night Markets are also not to be missed. Not just in Chiang Rai but also around Bangkok. You can buy lots of artsy, kpop, hipster, instagramm-able stuff for extremely low prices.

Bangkok 

I’m placing Bangkok last as, to be honest, I enjoyed the rural parts of Thailand more. Bangkok is definitely THE city.

It has that fast-paced, tourist-y city vibe but of course, it houses places you can only experience there. My advice is go to the Central Pier and try to visit every station along the river. 

If you are planning to do that, then don’t buy the tourist boat pass which will only take you to the few stations where the popular tourist spots are. 

But if you only have time for the usual places, then the pass will be worth it. 

Visit the Wats (Wat Po, Wat Arun, etc.) and the Grand Palace. 

Because it’s the city, expect that entrance fees are a bit pricier (and that the places are a bit overcrowded). For example, going inside the Grand Palace already costs 500baht (it’s expensive, I know!) so expect an entrance fee of around 100-500 baht per place. 

If you are on a tight budget though, I suggest going to the Grand Palace as it already houses a lot of temples and Thai-styled buildings. But Wat Arun also is not to be missed... so aim for those two!

There’s a well-known scam wherein as you are heading to, say, the Grand Palace, a hustler will tell you that unfortunately, the place is closed that day and will offer you a private tour of the city instead for a fee. Politely decline these offers. If someone tells you that a place is closed, it most likely isn’t, and they are simply hoping you’d hire them as a tour guide because they seem to know so much. Always check the place out yourself or ask Google.

By the way, if you’re into the unusual or just want to try something exotic, visit Siriraj Medical Museum in Bangkok. I don’t have pictures since taking photos is strictly prohibited - plus, even if it weren’t, I wouldn’t be able to get myself to stare long enough at each piece displayed, because this is where you can find preserved corpses of people who died from, well... different reasons. There’s just lots of dead bodies, guys! 

Yep, it’s definitely creepy. I went with a Romanian guy and he walked out as soon as he walked in. Hahahahaha. It’s definitely something you can only experience in Bangkok though. Here, I’m grabbing this photo from Google Images with the watermark to show you what it’s like: (credits to the owner)

Ughhhh, just remembering it gives me the creeps. PS: that’s a real corpse!

Dumping unrelated, happier, Bangkok photos now.

Ang Thong

I almost forgot! Let’s not forget to visit Ang Thong! I spent a lot of time here with an awesome family - my Thai fam. *remembers fondly*

It’s an hour or two away from Bangkok and it was my first rural experience since arriving. It’s a quiet town that feels like it’s siesta time all the time.

Also, you can find LOTS of temples here and the biggest Buddhas, so if you are like me who wanted to do a Temple Run, you’ll love it here. I was extremely fortunate to spend the Sogkran Festival (Thai New Year) here with great people.

Overall, if you are planning your first solo backpacking trip like I was, Thailand is definitely the place to go, simply because it’s not as expensive as other places. Hostels go for as low as 200php a night and a meal costs around 50php. It’s a way for you to experience a completely different culture and way of life without being too far away from home.

With fondness and nostalgia,

N

[golden-plumeria]

As far as feedback goes, I don't agree with the recent trend of not giving full size artwork to people. Some of the more recent batches of coadles are positively tiny and the art seems pretty low quality (resolution), it is scandalous to expect people to pay hundreds of dollars to not provide the full size artwork out of laziness. I don't care about the "you pay for the rights to use the species" reasoning because its an excuse not an explanation, people care about this species but feel cheated.

Answered by Tay and Maho

Tay - While i can understand your’s and other’s frustration. You have to understand that many adoptables out there that go over $1000 and sometimes even over $2000 are never given a separate image with them but many people find no issue with it or feel cheated. This may only be an issue with Maho because Maho put in the extra effort from the onset to give refs complimentary to her designs but was taken advantage of. So while other artists never started out giving refs, their members never feel cheated because they never had that opportunity to begin with. Maho did, so when she no longer gives them it was Maho who was at fault. It is done out of protection of her art, and to keep other users from using the full sized refs to scam others. Some people do have the idea that a full size art = ownership and someone who can come to own one or find the posted full size can sell to multiple people using the art as proof of ownership and scamming others (Happened in other communities already and becoming a trend). Rather than referring to the masterlist, and is very unsafe. One CS artist was being bullied into refunding those who were scammed because they thought the full refs meant the person could sell it to them but never checked the actual owner’s list to verify. The full sized ref = ownership idea is was probably the worst thing to put as the standard in the community in the first place and in the community in general and has been causing lots of issues with many CS creators. To avoid the same issues it was also implemented with our species to remove full sized refs. It’s the “Someone ruined it for everyone else” sort of deal and we apologize for that. If every member was perfect and respectful of the art this would have never happened. Another thing is Maho and her admins do not always receive more than 200$ for the adopts they make let alone 100$ at most. She does not believe in charging any more than 200$ autobid for her species because she still tries to maintain fairness and allows others that can’t even go over 25$ a chance to gain one of her species for free through hard work and fun events. 

We have a master list that proves the ownership of who ever buys a certain design. Ive talked to many people of the community and most of them do not feel cheated over the recent events of not receiving files. In fact the majority understand why it happened, but as for you feeling cheated the most i can do is apologize for it and that no harm was meant by it. Also please know that as we are currently aware of only Maho is not giving out files to her adopts but the other admin still might with theirs. Just a bit of info, sorry for rambling ^^; Tried to get out as much info i knew to help out. Maho - I am willing to give out transparent files (Without BG, full size if the small batch ones since I post them at 50% size) if asked only. But it would be in my free time and not part of the design’s cost. It would be me doing it for free since the money I get from the design usually doesn’t even cover the cost of making it alone and time spent adding it to the master list, hours working to polish etc. Majority of my designs sell for less than 50 dollars and it takes me hours to do one design. From our perspective we feel that no one should say “I feel cheated” if they pay less than the work itself and expect even more for free. We don’t show how long it takes to design these so we know that outside our admin circle people don’t see all the background work we put into all this, especially if they do not run a species themself and realize that 99% of work (Admin, modding, item designing, programing, html, masterlist updating, rule making, tweeking and working to improve) all go unpaid. So I understand the frustration, but I don’t ever “Set stuff in stone” and I always am able to bend a bit for people who are willing to work with me and be patient. But the art is just complimentary (Me doing it for a good member) not owed to the designs anymore. I like using BGless refs myself from other species I own so I definitely understand and sometime in the future may find a way to post my designs in an appealing way that has no bg and is easy to crop if in a batch but still keeps some sort of small watermark.  And the tiny designs you speak of, mostly sell for 25 to 30 dollars a piece and are kept small to encourage people to make the price fair for those who cannot afford the larger sized more polished ones. So they can still get one of the species but more affordable. Think of it like fabric at a store, you get discounts if you get scraps or edge of fabric pieces. And give people who cannot afford the highest tier fabric cuts a chance to get fabric. I KNOW how it feels to be priced out of species and if I can make simple, easier and smaller designs to give less financially able people a chance at it I will give them that chance like I’d like from other species. And these designs can be drawn full size and much better at a later date to with YCHs, and rebase commissions by Myself or my admin. No one should feel stuck with tiny art when there are lots of ways to get them drawn, or even draw them yourself the size you’d like if you can. There are lots of options and I hope that our ramblings have helped in some way. People should understand both sides to this and that we are trying our best, and our best may not be the best for everyone. We do not force anyone to buy our designs, or force them to stay in the community and if refs is a deal breaker there are lots of species from really nice people who do give refs. But they may be pricier or harder to get into.Last note - Those who work for practically free when everything is calculated together and continue to work as hard as they can to create a community despite the cost/hours disparity I wouldn’t consider lazy. Lazy is not running a CS group in the first place and not having to work with strangers and avoid conflicts since you don’t get them by not doing anything.

[teachanarchy]

“I think the computers have complicated lives very greatly. The whole, you know, age of computer, has made it where nobody knows exactly what’s going on.”

—Donald Trump, Dec. 29, 2016

The night of Donald Trump’s electoral victory, as journalists and pollsters sat stunned, alt-right trolls on the online imageboard 4chan were declaring ecstatic victory. The election outcome was, for them, the culmination of a long-orchestrated campaign they had dubbed “The Great Meme Wars.” “Will we ever experience something this great again?” an anonymous poster wrote on the site’s “politically incorrect” imageboard, the post accompanied by a twist on one of the site’s more popular characters, Wojak, the character’s MS Paint-rendered visage outfitted in Nazi SS gear. “The meme wars of 2015/2016 are over and we are the winners.”

Who were these self-declared winners? A bizarre allegiance of online trolls, experts at manufacturing memes—the jokey, absurdist images, often overlaid with text, that are copied and spread endlessly with slight variations by people online. Through memes and the clandestine net spaces they used to share them, these trolls met and formed a Frankenstein political bloc out of adult My Little Pony fans, furries, anime enthusiasts, self-described “masculinists,” disgruntled video gamers, Neo-Nazis, white nationalists, xenophobes, neo-monarchists, reactionaries, old-school racists, and nihilists in search of edgy lols. They were coronated the “alt-right” by white nationalist “leader” Richard Spencer, and referred to Trump as “God Emperor” on Reddit, where they made the r/The_Donald forum into one of the most popular on the hugely popular news and web content aggregation site.

As trivial as it may seem, The Great Meme Wars and the chaos it wrought on social media likely had a very real effect on the 2016 election. By weaponizing their memes, berating their targets with aggressive rhetorical strategies, and generally acting as outrageously as possible, the so-called alt-right gained the acknowledgement of both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, hijacked the mainstream media, and dragged the national Overton Window toward their extremist views in the process—all from the safely removed distance of their crusty keyboards.

They may have won the battle, but according to their opposition—some of which is located in the Northwest—the Great Meme Wars are far from over.

“I try to clean up messes, but I also try to create them,” a woman named Addy says over the phone as she prepares to relocate from her lifelong home in the Midwest to the Northwest, where she says she will be “safer.” The line goes silent for a moment—the sound of distant gulping and a staticky video barking something about counter-terrorist operations in the background. “I’ve got to tell you something real quick as I chug my Mountain Dew, because yes, I’m a memer. I’m not the alt-right, but I still drink Mountain Dew. Anyways, yeah, I actually consider myself more of a ‘social hacker’ than a memer. Every hacker is either addicted to chaos or addicted to order. I myself am addicted to chaos, but I’m chaotic good.”

Before she came out as a trans woman, Addy (who asked Seattle Weekly to withhold her last name) spent a lot of time on 4chan and took part in the same early troll culture that would, many years later, form the alt-right. “I was the embodiment of 4chan,” she says. “I would say anything just to get a rise, do anything just to get a rise. I don’t even feel comfortable talking about the person I used to be.” Then something changed. Addy’s sibling married a black woman; along came two new black nieces; and soon Addy had a biracial child of her own. “I started realizing I was a racist, a sexist, all these things. It wasn’t hard to admit that—it was empowering to admit that, because once I did, I could destroy it. I’ve been on a warpath ever since.”

She left 4chan and began spending more time in another meme-making community she found on Facebook. There she would start her own page to distribute her own memes. She named the page Lettuce Dog and adopted a logo that is, indeed, a head of lettuce fashioned to look like a dog. Just a month after Addy began Lettuce Dog, in the fall of 2015, she had amassed 9,000 followers. Today, roughly a year, four months, and 1,700 memes later, that number has grown to 93,000. On a decent week, Lettuce Dog’s memes will reach 1 to 3 million people using the same troll tactics Addy learned from 4chan and often sparking fierce political debate in the comments.

Take one simple meme she made in November. Featuring a stock photo of two Jet Ski riders carving through ocean waves, a message is written in goofy blue font: “It’s time to get EXTREME about destroying white supremacy.” The nonsensical image was liked by 2,100 people, shared over a thousand times, and resulted in conversations between Addy and upset commenters about white guilt and the definitions of racism and white supremacy.

According to Addy, when she began Lettuce Dog on Facebook, there were only two types of meme pages. “There were really stuffy, obnoxious social-justice-warrior pages—completely humorless, very angry white allies complaining about things,” she says. On the flipside there were “dank” meme pages—pages that “were on so many layers of irony, just totally out there, playing with the human mind.” With Lettuce Dog, Addy had decided to combine the two forms and create what is likely the first “dank social-justice page.” Countless others followed the same path until dank social-justice pages constituted their own subculture, known as “Weird Facebook.” As a collective, these pages reach somewhere in the tens of millions.

While plenty of Weird Facebook pages are largely apolitical, the community overall tends to have a far-left bent—its memes are often anti-capitalist, fiercely pro-LGBTQ, social-justice oriented, and sit on a spectrum that ranges from anarchist, Democratic socialist, socialist, and Marxist to full-on communist. Collectivism is a central tenet of Weird Facebook. “Individualism is terrible and inevitably going to die,” says Addy, who self-identifies as an “anarcho-collectivist,” but isn’t shy about espousing explicitly communist values and ideas in her memes.

Via Lettuce Dog

Weird Facebook content creators typically don’t care to take credit for their work, preferring to remain anonymous while posting to pages with names like “Gangster Popeye,” “G a Y L O R M O O N S a Y S” or “I play KORN to my DMT plants, smoke blunts all day & do sex stuff.”

The community is also structured in a collectivist framework—they don’t compete, but share each other’s content freely, cooperating in an effort to drive fans to each other’s pages and help grow each others’ audiences. They do this because memes live and die by the masses, their strength and potency directly tied to how many people are engaging with them rather than the prestige of any individual creator.

By their very nature, memes represent a violation of traditional notions of “ownership.” Everything from trademarked intellectual properties, pop-culture detritus, watermarked stock photos, random cyber-garbage off Google images, and AP news photos to the very structure of past memes themselves are on the table for endless remixing by the masses who share them and participate in their creation. As a result, “normies,” as meme-culture outsiders are called, might not even be able, at first glance, to decode a meme—the result of a cascading, mutating series of Dadaist in-jokes and symbols whose agreed meanings that, while somewhat fixed, are also incredibly fluid, largely guided by their makers’ intuition rather than any logical plan.

“When you log into the Internet, you’re plugging your brain into millions, billions of other brains,” Addy says. “The Internet is a giant brain, just like a neural network.” She claims her most popular memes have come to her in visions not unlike those of religious mystics. “Sometimes I feel like the Internet wills me to make certain memes, like I’m plugged directly into the zeitgeist.”

Addy isn’t the only meme-maker at Lettuce Dog. Like most of the other Weird Facebook pages, hers has a decentralized structure with a number of administrators, a collaborative practice that results, often intentionally, in a more diverse array of voices.

Although it’s impossible to know the racial or gender makeup of the alt-right or trolls in general due to their anonymity, researcher Whitney Phillips, who spent six years infiltrating, observing, and interacting in troll spaces for her 2015 book This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling Culture and Mainstream Media, notes that “what is empirically verifiable, however, is the observable fact that trolling behaviors are gendered male, are raced as white, and are dependent upon a certain degree of economic privilege.” Alt-right politics, while all over the place, hinge largely on white identity politics—thus the opposition on Weird Facebook often relies on and prides itself on its rainbow coalition of counter-trolls to fight those same tactics.

Via Cory in the Abyss

In addition to Addy, a white trans woman, Lettuce Dog’s three other contributors are a digital artist (a white cis-woman), an Instagram manager (a white cis-man), and a black meme-maker named Cory in the Abyss, who runs his own Weird Facebook page as well.

After admiring each other’s memes and their shared politics, Addy reached out to Cory and asked if he would join the Lettuce Dog team as a writer/content-creator, agreeing to cross-post his page’s memes to hers as payment. “It’s a really intersectional process,” Cory tells me. “I’m not up on trans issues, so Addy kind of makes trans issues more visible for me. On the other hand, I help her see race issues in a way a white person might not see them. So we compliment each other’s shortcomings politically, but it’s all propelled generally in that same far-left direction.”

Via Lettuce Dog

Cory started making memes after growing frustrated with his original arts medium of choice: poetry. “I felt frustrated with its ivory-tower elitism,” he says. “With a poem, you might get published in a journal, and then a few people in academia might read it. When I make a meme, I post it, and almost right away it reaches thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of people. It’s immediate, and honestly, probably the most pragmatic way to reach people now.”

Via Cory in the Abyss

Another Weird Facebook page called Eses Be Wilin was born of a similar spirit. “A friend of mine from central California started the page, and I asked to join as an admin when it had maybe 100 likes,” Jorge Bustamante (who asked Seattle Weekly not to use his real name), tells me from his Seattle home. A “Latinx ghetto cultural empowerment” page, it has amassed 27,000 followers in the year it’s been up. “Eses Be Wilin started in the midst of the Trump campaign—I got involved because I feel like Latin American oppression arises every election cycle, and I wanted to show that what many might perceive as the bottom of the barrel of Latin culture is actually a very rich culture. There’s a lot of Chicano pride pages on Facebook, but we were the first to bring meme-ing to that culture and that audience, which is why I think the page took off so quickly.”

Bustamante and his friend began with a central-Californian Chicano cultural focus, but they quickly added a Dominican admin, a Puerto Rican admin, and a Guatemalan admin in an effort to represent the wider Latin American experience. Like Lettuce Dog, Eses Be Wilin peddles primarily absurdist-humor memes, but sprinkles in memes with political, resistance-oriented motifs as well—memes that address Western imperialism, colonialism, police violence, the Zapatista movement, and the United Farm Workers movement.

Though Trump was the main reason Bustamante felt prompted to make memes about Latinx culture, he chose the form as his medium for a separate reason—declining faith in mainstream media’s issues coverage. “One [outlet] I stopped following recently is CNN,” he says. “I used to read them every day, but I haven’t in months because during the election cycle, the front of their website every day was some inconsequential shit regarding e-mail scandals or some mean thing Donald Trump said. That was it, just the same shit back and forth. There was nothing to learn at that point—I started to feel like real news was becoming inaccessible. I think that’s why a lot of people are turning to memes.”

Media analyst Andrew Tyndall released a report on Oct. 26 noting that from the beginning of 2016 to the time of its publication, ABC’s World News Tonight, the CBS Evening News and the NBC Nightly News had devoted a mere 32 minutes total to issues coverage—defined by Tyndall as coverage which “takes a public policy, outlines the societal problem that needs to be addressed, describes the candidates’ platform positions and proposed solutions, and evaluates their efficacy.”

What dominated instead? The endlessly controversial exploits of Donald Trump, who earned 327 minutes of coverage, a third of the year’s total airtime, and “more than the entire Democratic race combined.” Tyndall’s report focused on only three major broadcast news programs, but Donald Trump’s stranglehold on the media’s attention across the board—print journalism, web journalism, blogs, television, radio, mainstream media, independent media, alternative media—and the corresponding lack of substantive issues coverage were observable to anyone who consumed any kind of news this past year.

In her book, Phillips proposes a somewhat radical thesis about the media and trolls. The trolls who lurk on Facebook, Reddit, 4chan, and Twitter spewing vile racist, xenophobic, and misogynistic transgressions—the ones the media consistently deride as societal outsiders—actually fit very neatly into the contemporary cultural landscape. In fact, they simply mirror the methodologies of a mainstream media that thrives on controversy. “Not only do these outlets give trolls precisely what they want—specifically, a national platform—they validate the impulse to troll,” Phillips writes. “As sensationalist media have proven again and again, these behaviors work, and not just for trolls. The behaviors also work for mainstream media companies, since stories about trolling translate into page views, and page views translate into advertising revenue, and advertising revenue is the lifeblood of any successful media organization.”

Trump laid out his understanding of this very phenomenon—albeit in its analog form—three decades ago in his memoir The Art of the Deal: “One thing I’ve learned about the press is that they’re always hungry for a good story, and the more sensational the better. The point is that if you are a little different, or a little outrageous, or if you do things that are bold or controversial, the press is going to write about you.”

In fact, many in the alt-right refer to The Art of the Deal as The Art of the Troll.

Trolls hit the big time—with assistance from the media—on Sept. 12, when hillaryclinton.com published an article with the subhead “That cartoon frog is more sinister than you realize.” The frog in question was Pepe—who began his life in Matt Furie’s Boy’s Club comic series from the mid-2000s, a collection of which was published last year by Seattle publisher Fantagraphics. The comics follow the stoneriffic adventures of four anthropomorphic animal roommates. In one comic from 2008, Pepe is caught peeing with his pants all the way down. When confronted by his roommate about it, he responds, “feels good man.” Pepe’s smiling frog head, with the words “feels good man,” became an innocent icon on the Internet and a fixture of early meme culture, endlessly remixed onto countless bodies expressing a range of emotions (“feels bad man”).

But on 4chan, Twitter, and r/the_donald, an army of “alt-right” trolls began churning out an incredibly high volume of incendiary “smug” Pepes (Pepe smirking with his hand on his chin). Some were simply of green, Pepe-fied Trumps or Pepes wearing red “Make America Great Again” hats, which Donald Trump and Trump Jr. both retweeted. But many more were Nazi Pepes—Pepe as Hitler, Pepe as SS officer, Pepe holding guns to the heads of minorities and women, and Jew Pepes, drawn in the style of anti-Semitic WWII propaganda posters.

With the help of Pepe’s cartoon grin, the alt-right was winning.

“For the past year and a half, they destroyed us in memes,” Bustamante says. “They beat everyone in memes this past election—they made so many, they made more than us, they made so many effective ones. They were better content creators. It doesn’t matter if they’re politically inept or living in their mom’s basement, what matters is they’re outwardly expressing this train of thought, bringing together people with vaguely similar interests to congregate in the same space on the Internet.”

The sheer volume of these memes yielded real results—the unparalleled level of activity most evident in the engagement on r/the_donald. Thanks to Reddit’s algorithm, the questionable content at play on that subreddit was thrust to the front page. The domination was so intense that Reddit decided to change the algorithm on June 15 in an attempt to present its general users with some semblance of variety.

All of this, of course, was “just about having fun,” as alt-right media platform Breitbart wrote in March. Then Clinton declared that Pepe the frog was a white nationalist symbol, akin to a swastika. In one fell swoop, she both legitimized a band of trolls and officially handed it sole ownership of a powerful meme. “Everything has been weird since the day Hillary talked about Pepe,” Bustamante says. “I think that was a very dark time for memes. From that point on, everything the alt-right did was validated.”

Two weeks later, the Anti-Defamation League officially filed Pepe the frog as a hate symbol. The alt-right were thrilled at the “triggered” media. The Hill, Vanity Fair, Talking Points Memo, CNN, The Economist, MSNBC, and countless others took the bait, drawn to the story’s literal cartoonish extremes. Suddenly swastikas were everywhere, and the alt-right, previously a fringe web group, was a household name.

The coup, in turn, further revealed the increasingly low bar of mainstream media coverage. In one instance, Chris Matthews on MSNBC exclaimed that “the green guy there has become a popular symbol of white nationalism—I didn’t know this! I’m learning! […] I know none of this stuff! But I now know it. I just learned it today,” admitting his lack of knowledge and context of the meme in a rush to brand it a hate symbol. The first article that comes up in a Google search of Pepe, a Los Angeles Times article on Pepe as a hate symbol, doesn’t even get the name of Furie’s comic correct, calling it Boy’s Life, similarly exhibiting a lack of real knowledge or insight while simultaneously handing its ownership to the alt-right. Following the newfound legitimization, white nationalist Richard Spencer seized a media spotlight and became a “spokesperson” for the “movement,” which until then had been little more than an online mob.

Soon after the Pepe episode, it was revealed in The Daily Beast that Palmer Luckey, the almost-billionaire creator of the Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset, which is Facebook-owned and has offices in Seattle, was the secret backer of a pro-Trump, anti-Hillary “meme magic” nonprofit campaign called Nimble America which filed for a 501(c)(4) in September. Inspired by the success of the provocative Pepes, Luckey sought to fund a group of meme-making trolls he was in contact with so they could churn similar content out on social media full-time. Posting on r/the_donald as “NimbleRichMan,” Luckey wrote “we’ve proven that shitposting is powerful and meme magic is real. So many of you have asked us, how we can bring this to real life,” promising to match donations to the upstart meme organization dollar for dollar.

“There’s all this ‘fake news’ now,” Cory in the Abyss says, “and in a way we’re also ‘fake.’ The difference is, with our memes, we have an agenda, and there’s no pretense about those agendas. The exciting thing about memes now is that we’ve kind of become like pirate news—we don’t represent an institution or an establishment. The left can troll too.”

While the alt-right may have outpaced the left in the first battle of the Great Meme Wars, Weird Facebook has seemingly become the most formidable, viable challenger to the movement’s nihilistic, irony-drenched tactics. Many collectivist memers revel in the historical precedent the communist Soviet Union set on the Eastern front in WWII when defeating the Nazis’ fascist empire—images from which admins of Weird Facebook often weaponize as memes in their own battles against the alt-right. But as Phillips wonders in her book, if “certain forms of trolling can be justified, is the righteousness of a particular act compromised if it replicates precisely the cultural logics it seeks to dismantle?”

According to Lettuce Dog, the answer is a firm yes. “So, remember, I’m chaotic good,” she says. “Trump and the alt-right are chaotic too—chaotic evil.”

For Addy, a core value separates Weird Facebook’s trolling tactics from that of the alt-right’s. “I’ll intentionally make a meme that I know will stir a lot of controversy and anger a lot of people,” she says, “but with the express purpose of empowering marginalized people.” Early on, when Lettuce Dog was first gaining in popularity, Addy posted a meme that began to get “tons of shares.” Although the meme was well-intentioned, as most of hers are, when a Mexican man reached out and explained to Addy why he thought the meme was offensive, she had to make a fateful decision: “Should I be a white asshole, tell him to shut up, and keep the successful meme rolling? Or should I not be a prick, and make another that’s less offensive?”

The answer wasn’t obvious at first. Her time in the extreme, taboo-breaking culture of 4chan had trained Addy to place edginess above all else. But she decided she was done with that. “I deleted it, apologized to him, and have continued to run my page that way,” she says. “Now with the Internet, we’re all sharing one collective mind, so to hurt any part of that collective is to hurt the whole collective—to harm me. The 13-year-olds typing the n-word on YouTube don’t understand how much they’re hurting themselves.”

The alt-right is seemingly of a different mind when it comes to such empathy. Yet there is another area where Addy and her fellow memers hope to replicate their enemies: how to harness memes to hijack the media, use it against itself, and seize a national platform for their politics. “We don’t want to be edgy in a troll-comment way,” says Lettuce Dog admin Cory, “but edgy in that our memes stand on the edge of many different seams, make you think, and hopefully push you towards a better ideology. I think they’re the cultural foundation—the memes are the pre-body politic.”

And indeed, the loletariat did begin to rise just this past weekend. The Meme Wars took a decidedly sweet turn for Weird Facebook on Inauguration Day, when alt-right “leader” Richard Spencer was caught on camera during an interview getting punched in the face by a masked member of a black bloc. In an act of “meme magic,” the punch landed right as Spencer was beginning to explain the enamel pin on his lapel— “It’s Pepe, he’s become kind of a symbol … ” Smack!

In less than 24 hours, the clip had been remixed hundreds of times and shared by millions. In various iterations of the clip, the audible thud of the punch synched to the snare hits in “Born in the USA,” “Blue Monday,” and others. Still images of the violence were Photoshopped alongside images of Captain America and Indiana Jones punching Nazis, an activity memers presented as “American as apple pie.” “I’m afraid this is going to become the meme to end all memes,” Spencer later said on Periscope. “That I’m going to hate watching this.”

“I think what we’re going to see now is a lot more anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, anti-fascist content creation,” Bustamante says. “While people with those trains of thought have always been underrepresented under the neoliberal U.S. government and the media, I think approaching this far different flipside, being the alt-right and Trump, we’re going to be the new fighters in terms of content creation—primarily through memes at this time.”

Bustamante’s one reservation is Facebook’s own algorithm—which itself caught flack last summer for its seemingly arbitrary censorship of “inappropriate” memes and the pages that host them. The flashpoint for the criticism was a popular meme featuring a photo of a goose whose head appeared to be on fire—in reality, it was simply an illusion, created by a campfire in the background. Regardless, Facebook censored the meme, deeming it “graphic content.” Many follow-up memes highlighted the absurdity that mainstream-media images of bloodied Syrian children and the bodies of drowned refugees were allowed on the site, but this goose with a fake flaming head wasn’t. A 100-page strong “Meme Alliance” emerged to challenge Facebook’s policy and the algorithm.

Yet even without the alliance, it seems foolish to think Facebook could ever truly quash the flow of memes. Thanks to the masses, and Weird Facebook’s leaderless, collectivist structure, the memes will always find a way. But if there comes a need to go further underground, Addy, for one, has an idea.

“We need to start a hacktivist group called Unanimous,” she says, “and all wear Guy Fieri masks.”

ksears@seattleweekly.com